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Avebury Summer Solstice 2005 A couple of years had passed since my last solstice at Avebury. The changes were interesting and welcome. Overall people were younger this year. The midsummer gathering has a history of mixed age participation. That element is still prominent, though now skewed more toward youth. But the spirit of intergenerational coexistence remains strong. Much, in addition, is positive within the wider politics of the situation: despite increased numbers of gatherers, police kept a low profile. They organised a base outside the circle, but were non-confrontational in their approach. As the night began a group of people, perhaps three dozen, gathered near the centre of the great circle and formed a focus of involvement. Persistent drumming came from among them: strange mythic-like puppet mobiles danced above the human heads. More generally, compared with both earlier Avebury solstices and the more organised, druid-focussed Stonehenge events, a pattern of dispersal developed through the night. Small-ish groups had come from many places, forming temporary centres inside and around the henge. Within the wider celebration, often close to a stone, knots of family and friends made their own spaces. Others were more mobile among the landscape zones. Together with more solitary gatherers there was a shifting mosaic of overlapping clusters, many within eye and ear range of others. Each modulated the broader rhythms of the solstice as a whole. All this seemed quite familiar. Over recent weeks I had been writing a piece on Maiden Bower, the Neolithic enclosure underlying an Iron Age "fort" near Houghton Regis. While researching the British causewayed enclosures and their connections with the wider Neolithic, there was slowly coming into focus a picture of places of creative in-gathering, of localities where the life ways of foraging and domestication were interacting and interpenetrating. It seems "both sides" were involved in developing social ties and solidarities that would culminate in megalithic sites like Avebury. More than that: the tension between the logics of community and hierarchy that was being negotiated at such gatherings resonates more strongly (and more wastefully) than ever in our times, when global interdependence is as unprecedented as global exploitation. I was coming to see those primary enclosures as post-foraging social incubators involving exploration and consolidation, checking out and rethinking, insight and doubt, glimpsing emerging forms and their ambiguities. Over the night of the solstice there seemed something like that happening amongst the Avebury stones, but with a radical difference: we are products of the division of labour, whereas the Neolithic collectivists of Avebury were approaching ( and preparing ) its intensification. We and our world, in that sense, are the dusk of their dawn. Even so, the apparent line between perception and memory began to blur: people listening and talking; familiar narratives and flashes of now-ness; hopes for peace and rumours of wars; unexpected echoes and uneven glows... Human activity flowed and ebbed once again in this stony place of air, light and earth. The one with whom I wandered through the phases of the night saw thickening white pre-dawn glow flow over glacier-smoothed hillsides. Beneath the near-full moon and Jupiter she saw the cows among the stones of Beckhampton Avenue and felt what seemed the power of that ancient route. She sat close by the base of Silbury Hill and walked the Ridgeway heights. We welcomed the rising of the solstice sun, across the circle from the high north-western bank. From there we watched light congeal in blurrings and sharpenings, creating shifting lines and unnameable zones between trees, horizon, clouds and space itself. Soon the final chill was fading as the air began to warm, drying mist-soaked clothes and hair. For the first time in weeks poison headaches had not shaken the night. Just magic through the shades and swirls, a silvery time of waking dreams and playfulness and seeing things anew. David Binns. 3rd July 2005.
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