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| • | Durham 2 |
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| MALAYSIA | |
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We went to see this ancient monument on the way down to Oxford. This is the view from the top of the hill we climbed , you can see Sudbury castle and the town of Winchcombe - it had lots of old buildings in the streets. On the way down we ran through this big field which had just been mowed for hay. It was so windy up here that we could hardly stand. In the woods at the top of the hill there were lots of big fungi growing on old wood. I did all the navigating from where we left the motorway near Birmingham through here, down past Cheltenham and Cirencester to Avebury and then along to Oxford. Mostly we were on little B class country roads and part of the way we followed the old Roman road to London. |
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| This is at a place called Belas Knap, which is an ancient burial mound called a long barrow. There are several entrances to the barrow some have been blocked off but some of them you can walk a little way inside such as this one on the right. |
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Belas Knap was built about 2500BC so it's 4500
years old. It was used for burials of 38 humans plus some animals.
There's also lots of pottery in the chambers. Some of the entrances
are fake to trick robbers. The whole barrow is about 40m long and
about 3m high at the tallest point, that's a lot of earth to move! |
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This is me inside one of the entrances. I was
going to go inside one whcih you had to crawl to get in but Mummy
wouldn't let me. |
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The walls were
all made with flat stones 2cm thick and 10cm long. There were lots
of lichens and flowers growing onthe rocks so it was hard to tell
what type of rock it was. |
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This is a quorn which is used for grinding wheat to make flour, usually they would attach a horse to the wheel and the horse would walk round the base as the wheat was poured in. The horse had to ahve a bag on its head so it didn't get dizzy. This is in the main street at Avebury which is north of Stonehenge. It has a stone circle like Stonehenge but it is much bigger in diameter and the village was built in the middle. |
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This is part of the circle with the village sheep
grazing around the stones. There were heaps and there was alamb
by itself and it let us pat him. |
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| Some of these stones are about 1.5m tall and the tallest can be up to 4m tall. One man excavated the whole site to find the circle, it had gradually been buried by the villagers hundreds of years ago because it might look like they were witches or worshipping the devil. When the stones were uncovered they found the skeleton of a man who had been killed while helping to bury the stone - it fell on top of him. He was carrying scissors and razors so they think he was a travelling barber and just stopped by to help the villagers when he died. There's a big ditch and earth wall outside the circle of stones so perhaps they were to protect the settlement and its stones. It would have taken along time to make. |
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These are some pictures of the streets in Avebury.
The houses and gardens were beautiful, some of the houses had thatched
roofs. The town was very small and most of the roads were dead ends.
The houses were all white and the tourist office had a huge shop.
With all sorts of interesting things like minerals and stories of
the town. |
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I was talking about thatched
roofs above and the house on the left has a very good example. They
had to put chicken wire on the straw because it might get blown
away. They aren't really plain straw, they put a wood roof on then
put straw on top. |
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