Stonehenge in afternoon sunlight , 1 , Oil, 30 X 40 cm, painted from a photo I took on 23 October Author's artwork. The WHS covers two large areas of land separated by about 15 miles 24 km , rather than a specific monument or building. The sites were inscribed as co-listings in Some large and well known monuments within the WHS are listed below, but the area also has an exceptionally high density of small-scale archaeological sites, particularly from the prehistoric period.
More than individual archaeological features have been identified. There are separate Scheduled Monuments, covering items or features. Stonehenge in afternoon sunlight , 2 , Oil, 30 X 40 cm, painted from a photo I took on 23 October Avebury is a Neolithic henge monument containing three stone circles, around the village of Avebury in Wiltshire, in southwest England. One of the best known prehistoric sites in Britain, it contains the largest megalithic stone circle in the world.
It is both a tourist attraction and a place of religious importance to contemporary pagans. Constructed over several hundred years in the third millennium BC, during the Neolithic, or New Stone Age, the monument comprises a large henge a bank and a ditch with a large outer stone circle and two separate smaller stone circles situated inside the centre of the monument.
Its original purpose is unknown, although archaeologists believe that it was most likely used for some form of ritual or ceremony. The Avebury monument is a part of a larger prehistoric landscape containing several older monuments nearby, including West Kennet Long Barrow, Windmill Hill and Silbury Hill.
By the Iron Age, the site had been effectively abandoned, with some evidence of human activity on the site during the Roman period. During the Early Middle Ages, a village first began to be built around the monument, eventually extending into it. In the Late Medieval and Early Modern periods, local people destroyed many of the standing stones around the henge, both for religious and practical reasons. Aerial photo of the Avebury site and village. The chronology of Avebury's construction is unclear.
