Aidan 12, Avebury and Stonehenge

Tuesday 7th of June

Today we went to Avebury stone circle and  we went on a tour around the circle. There were three circles, a big one and two small ones inside it.

This is what it would have looked like when it was built

The big one was a not  perfect circle but the ones in the middle were. There were 4 entrances to the stone circle. The stones that were at the entrances were bigger than the rest of them around the circles.

Some of the stones were buried underground a long time ago.  People think this might have been to protect them.  When archaeologists were digging them up they found the skeleton of a man in the hole with one of the stones. The man got squashed when he was digging the hole for the stone to go in and the stone fell onto him and killed him.  When they found him the man had a leather bag with him with 3 coins and a pair of scissors and a pick so they called him a barber surgeon. Then they  sent it to a museum then the museum blew up in the war, and they thought that that was the end of that but it wasn’t. When someone went into a store room they found a box labelled barber surgeon when they opened the box there was the skeleton still with no  broken bones. It was a bit flat thought so they put it in there museum. 

We also went for a short walk to see Silbury hill.

Then went to see were they put their dead in a place called Long Barrow.  It is like a cave made of stones under a hill. They separated all the body parts into 5 different rooms.

In the 5^th room was a lady sitting in the dark, she creeped me out.     

Wednesday 8^th June

Today we  went to anther stone circle but this one was called Stonehenge. We first drove to Stonehenge and we had sandwiches because it was lunch time.  Then we went to get our audio guides. Holly and I got children’s audio guides.

We had to get on a bus to drive to the stones then we walked around on a path to find all the numbers then pressed the number then you have to  press play to listen to the guide. The biggest stone was 100 tons.  There is a saying that to make the henge they probably  had to roll them on wooden rollers with people pushing and pulling, but how did they get the stones standing up and the stones on top, that is the mystery.  The stones on top are called lintels and they hold on with little bumps in the big stones called tenons, they clip in just like Lego.  

you can see the tenon on the tall stone on the right

The stones that are standing are called standing stones. 

There were three bumps, one in the middle of the path and one on each side of the path they are called barrel holes where there were bones that were found. 

In the museum there were two cabinets with bones in them. There were people who worked with the museum who wanted to make wax  figures of both of the skeleton. but one of them didn’t have its who skull but the other did, so they made a wax figure of his head so we could see what he might have looked like.

 They took a D.N.A sample out of the skeleton and made a model of what his head of he might of looked like, it was a good model.  It was put next to the skeleton.