Thousands of years before there was a country called England, the people who lived in what is now County Wiltshire constructed a huge henge and several stone circles within it. A henge is a large, generally circular area of land bounded by a deep ditch and a built-up earth bank. Within its boundaries may be stone circles, posts, mounds, and pits.

The henge at Avebury, a village in Wiltshire some 90 miles west of London, is about 420 meters in diameter and is one of the largest Neolithic monuments in Europe. It is now a National Trust property and a World Heritage Site. It is a fascinating place, and unlike Stonehenge, visitors are free to walk among and marvel at the stones.

Archeologists have determined that originally there were at least 154 standing stones in three circles. They were 3.6 to 4.1 meters high, some weighing more than 40 tons, dragged or sledded from a quarry nearly 2 miles away. This enormous task began some 5,000 years ago and continued over centuries. Scientists note that there must have been a stable agrarian economy to allow for such time-consuming effort.

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