England Half Remembered - Avebury Stone Circle

Sometimes it's hard to accurately describe what I miss about Britain so I fall back on the trite in conversations - proper fish and chips and warm beer. That kind of thing.

But if I'm honest it's probably the gentleness of the land, the soft contours and days that are more subtle in their hues than here and the landscapes that are less savage; the autums when the nights are closing in and you find yourself in a remote country pub with the woodsmoke drifting over the moors.

It can be difficult to describe. The longer you live in America, the greater danger you are in of slipping into stereotype, until you have to don a red baseball jacket and white sneakers and fly to Stratford on Avon to yell: "It's so quaint. These houses must be 200 years old."

Once I lived a few score miles from Avebury Stone Circle on the Wiltshire Downs. It's less well known than Stonehenge but is the biggest stone circle in Europe. In many ways I prefer it to Stonehenge because it isn't surrounded by visitor centers, ropes and gaggles of visitors. Instead the stones circle a pleasant little village and you can walk around it in solitude on a spring evening when the clouds cast long shadows on England's green and pleasant land.

All around there is magic and strange feeling of a mysterious past long before Christianity. Nearby Silbury Hill is the largest man made mound in Europe. It rises like a strange angular spaceship from an early Sci Fi movie from the level downs. It remains a mystery.

Avebury Stone Circle is Neolithic and was constructed in about 2600 BC. Archaeologists believe that it was most likely used for some form of ritual or ceremony.

It's humbling to stand in the shadow of the stones as twilight falls on the downs and tiny flinty stars spring up in the evening sky. You realize your place in the great sweep of manind, the universe and the strange mystery of creation. And all of your daily worries are frankly insignificant. You could lose yourself on these downs and nothing would really matter.