Night Photography by David Baldwin

 

 


Avebury's Block Faces

I have suspected for a long time that a very important Avebury character was a rather rectangular or "block" faced spirit or deity. You can see this face all over the site, at various scales and orientations. My discovery of a particularly wonderful example on Stone 98 confirmed this intuition, and I have been stunned by the precision with which the block face has been repeated on some of the very largest or commanding Avebury monoliths. Below I show particularly good examples of the form, the faces on A and C are orientated as in life, but B has been flipped and rotated to enable easy and fair comparison.

Taken together these three images prove that the Avebury monoliths were carved, there is no natural explanation for the exactly repeated shapes.
 

Swindon Diamond (south side)

Stone 98

Stone 13b WKA

     
     
Since writing the above I have discovered yet another gigantic example of this "block" faced character, this time on the north side of the Swindon Diamond Stone (but orientated looking to the west, not the east). To see this massive sculpture, please click here and scroll down to view the animation on the page that opens. The "block" face is outlined there in magenta and is labelled "1,", there are several frames to the animation so you may have to wait a few seconds for the correct frame to appear.