The Sanctuary

Concrete Posts on a Windy Hill

Stand on Overton Hill today and you will see a field of small concrete posts set in the grass beside the A4 road. Some are painted red. Some are grey. They form concentric rings, the largest roughly 40 metres in diameter. Cars pass constantly. A layby sits a few metres away. There is no entrance fee, no visitor centre, no audio guide.

This is The Sanctuary — or rather, this is what The Sanctuary has become. The concrete posts mark the positions of timber uprights and standing stones that once formed one of the most significant ceremonial structures in Neolithic Wessex. For perhaps a thousand years, from around 3000 BCE to 2000 BCE, this hilltop held a building — or a monument, or a temple, or something for which we have no adequate modern word — that drew people across the landscape and anchored one end of the great processional avenue leading to Avebury.

Every stone and every timber was destroyed in the eighteenth century. What remains is an absence — precise, colour-coded, and haunting.

What Once Stood Here

The Sanctuary began as a timber structure. Around 3000 BCE, a ring of wooden posts was erected on the exposed summit of Overton Hill, overlooking the Kennet valley. Over the following centuries, this timber structure was rebuilt, enlarged, and elaborated. At its most complex, it consisted of six concentric rings of timber posts, the outermost approximately 20 metres in diameter, the posts themselves substantial — some estimated at 30–40 centimetres in diameter.

Whether these posts supported a roof (creating a large roundhouse or hall), stood as free-standing pillars open to the sky, or formed some hybrid structure is debated. The postholes tell us where the timbers stood, but not how high they reached or what they carried.

Around 2500 BCE, the timber structure was rebuilt — or transformed — in stone. Concentric rings of sarsen standing stones replaced (or supplemented) the wooden posts. The stone phase created two concentric circles: an inner ring approximately 15 metres in diameter and an outer ring approximately 40 metres in diameter.

At some point during or after this transformation, the West Kennet Avenue was constructed, linking The Sanctuary to the great henge at Avebury, 2.5 kilometres to the northwest.

Maud Cunnington's Excavation

We know what we know about The Sanctuary largely because of one woman.

Maud Cunnington (1869–1951) was one of the most important field archaeologists working in Wiltshire in the early twentieth century. She came from a dynasty of Wiltshire antiquarians — her husband's ancestor William Cunnington had excavated Bush Barrow near Stonehenge in 1808. Maud, however, was a formidable archaeologist in her own right, at a time when women in the discipline were rare and often marginalised.

In 1930, Cunnington excavated The Sanctuary. The site had been known since William Stukeley's surveys of the 1720s, but its exact nature was unclear. Stukeley had recorded concentric stone circles before they were destroyed; local tradition held that the stones had marked something significant. But no one had dug.

Cunnington's excavation was meticulous. She uncovered the concentric rings of postholes and stoneholes that revealed the site's complex history — the successive phases of timber construction followed by stone. She identified the colour-coding system still used today: red concrete markers for timber post positions, grey concrete markers for stone positions. She published her findings in the Wiltshire Archaeological and Natural History Magazine in 1931.

"The discovery of the post-holes came as a complete surprise. Nothing of the kind had been anticipated, and the whole character of the site was altered by their discovery." — Maud Cunnington, 1931

Cunnington also found human remains.

The Dead at The Sanctuary

Near the centre of the monument, Cunnington discovered the burial of a teenager — a young person, approximately 14 or 15 years old, placed in a crouched position beside one of the stone settings. The burial was accompanied by a Beaker pottery vessel, dating it to approximately 2400–2200 BCE, during the transition from the Neolithic to the Early Bronze Age.

This was not the only burial. Additional human bones were found scattered across the site, some disarticulated — separated from their original anatomical positions — suggesting that bodies had been exposed or processed at The Sanctuary before final burial elsewhere, a practice known to archaeologists as excarnation.

The presence of the dead at The Sanctuary is significant. It suggests that this was not merely a gathering place or ceremonial hall, but a site intimately connected with death, the dead, and the transition between states of being. The teenager buried with Beaker pottery was laid to rest at a moment of cultural transformation — the old Neolithic world of collective burial and communal monument-building giving way to the new Bronze Age world of individual burial and personal grave goods.

The Colour-Coded Markers

Today, The Sanctuary is marked by concrete posts set into the ground at the positions identified by Cunnington's excavation. The colour-coding system is simple and effective:

• Red markers indicate the positions of timber posts — the wooden uprights of the earlier phases.
• Grey markers indicate the positions of standing stones — the sarsen megaliths of the later phase.

Walking among the markers, you can trace the evolution of the monument from timber to stone. The innermost rings are red — timber — representing the earliest phases. The outermost rings include grey markers — stone — representing the later transformation.

The effect is ghostly. You are walking through the skeleton of a building that no longer exists, reading its anatomy from coloured dots in the grass. On a still day, with the wind dropping and the traffic lulling, you can begin to sense the shape of the vanished structure — the concentric rings tightening toward the centre, the posts thickening, the space closing in.

Destruction

The Sanctuary was destroyed in 1724. The farmer who owned the land — identified by Stukeley simply as "Mr Griffin" — broke up the standing stones for building material and cleared the site for ploughing. Stukeley, who had surveyed and drawn the stones just a few years earlier, was appalled.

"This old building was demolished by the same person, to the great disturbance of the solstice here, that built a cottage near West Kennet, with the stones."

Stukeley's account, combined with his earlier drawings, provides the only record of what the stone phase of The Sanctuary looked like before its destruction. His plans show concentric rings of standing stones, some substantial, arranged on the exposed hilltop. Without Stukeley's records, Cunnington's excavation would have been far harder to interpret.

The destruction of The Sanctuary was part of a wider campaign of stone-breaking that devastated the Avebury landscape in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Stones were broken using the fire-and-water method — a fire was built against the sarsen until it was scorching hot, then cold water was thrown on the heated surface, shattering the stone along fracture planes. The broken pieces were used as building material. An entire prehistoric landscape was consumed to build farmhouses and field walls.

The Processional Way

The Sanctuary's deepest significance lies not in what stood on Overton Hill, but in what connected it to Avebury.

The West Kennet Avenue — a double row of approximately 100 pairs of standing stones, stretching 2.5 kilometres across the downland — linked The Sanctuary to the southern entrance of the great henge at Avebury. The stones were spaced approximately 20–30 metres apart, with the avenue measuring 15–25 metres wide. The stones themselves were carefully selected: tall, narrow pillar-shaped stones alternated with broad, squat lozenge-shaped stones. Early archaeologists and modern scholars alike have interpreted these alternating forms as representing male and female principles — a symbolic pairing that transformed the avenue into a passage through gendered space.

Walking the avenue from The Sanctuary to Avebury, you move from a hilltop site associated with death and transformation (human burials, excarnation, the processing of the dead) to a valley-bottom site associated with ceremonial gathering and the living community (the great henge, the village, the seasonal festivals). This journey — from death to life, from hilltop to valley, from small enclosure to vast monument — may have been the central ritual act of the Avebury landscape.

The archaeologist Joshua Pollard has described the avenue as a route from the domain of the ancestors to the domain of the living — a processional way walked by the community at significant moments in the calendar, carrying the dead or their memory from hilltop to henge.

The walk from The Sanctuary to Avebury takes approximately 35–50 minutes at a steady pace. It is one of the most powerful walks in British archaeology — not for what you see, but for what you feel: the slow descent from hilltop to valley, the stones appearing and disappearing in the grass, the henge gradually revealing itself on the horizon.

Walking the Avenue Today

Of the original ~200 stones in the West Kennet Avenue, 27 remain standing, mostly near the Avebury end. Another 37 lost positions are marked with concrete posts — smaller versions of the same colour-coding system used at The Sanctuary. Many of the surviving stones were re-erected by Alexander Keiller during his 1930s restoration campaign.

The walk is straightforward:

1. Begin at The Sanctuary on Overton Hill. The site is on the south side of the A4, just east of the junction with the Ridgeway.
2. Cross the A4 carefully (there is no formal crossing — traffic is fast).
3. The avenue heads northwest across open farmland. The first section crosses cultivated fields and the stone positions are marked by concrete posts — the stones themselves have been lost.
4. As you approach Avebury, surviving standing stones appear — first singly, then in pairs, growing larger and more closely spaced.
5. The avenue enters Avebury through the southern entrance of the henge, where the stones are most densely concentrated and most dramatically preserved.

Practical Visitor Information

The Sanctuary is managed by English Heritage as a Scheduled Ancient Monument. Access is free and unrestricted at all times.

What You Will See

Let us be honest. If you visit The Sanctuary expecting a stone circle, you will be disappointed. There are no standing stones. There is no visible earthwork. There are concrete posts in a field beside a busy road.

But if you visit The Sanctuary knowing what once stood here — if you understand that these colour-coded dots represent a thousand years of building, rebuilding, ritual, and death — then the site becomes something else entirely. It becomes a place where imagination must do the work that the eyes cannot.

Stand at the centre of the concentric rings. Look northwest along the line of the avenue toward Avebury, invisible beyond the rolling chalk. Imagine the timber uprights rising around you — massive posts, perhaps painted or carved, their tops lost in shadow or open sky. Imagine the stones that replaced them — grey sarsens hauled from the Marlborough Downs, set upright in the chalk, their shapes alternating between pillar and lozenge, male and female. Imagine the teenager buried at your feet, curled on their side with a clay beaker, laid to rest in the floor of a monument that had already been ancient for five centuries.

Then turn and look southeast, toward the ridge where West Kennet Long Barrow lies. The Sanctuary sits precisely between the world of the living and the world of the dead. That was its purpose. That was its power.

The concrete posts do not convey this. But they mark the exact spots where it happened.

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