Alton Barnes Goddess

This (basic) sketch is based on the illustration in J D Wakefields' book where I first learned about the Alton Barnes Goddess.  If you want to see the Goddess for yourself, drive from Alton Priors village eastward towards Pewsey on the Alton Road.   You can easily identify the Goddess complex as it appears immediately to the right (or east) of the Alton Barnes Horse.

Since reading about the Alton Barnes Goddess in Wakefield's book I have discovered another reference to her:

"The fields around Alton Barnes have birthed many crop circles over the years.   Here, as in Avebury, there is a recurrent theme of the Goddess in local mythology. The hills just north of Alton Barnes are undulating and serpentine for several miles running east and west.   They look like a huge woman or goddess lying in repose, with certain features of this lovely landscape forming the appearance of her breast (Adam's Grave), pregnant stomach (Knap Hill) and vulva (a small alcove just to the east of Knap Hill).   This alcove is in a confluence of underground waters and has two thick copses of trees..... has a carved pathway or trench that looks like a serpentine umbilical cord running down the hillside and into the well-known East Field ...."

(Taken from p6 of "Crop Circles Revealed: Language Of The Light Symbols" by J Moore and B Lamb, Published by Light Technology 2002)

My Thoughts

1.   I wonder if future archaeologists will work out where exactly the Alton Barnes Goddess was intended to be observed from, and then excavate there to find some sort of neolithic marker or relic.

2.   The existence of  the Alton Barnes Goddess raises the possiblity that neolithic people might have viewed the peaks and troughs of the entire Pewsey Downs range as an interlocking chain of figures each representing the Great Goddess, not just the Adam's Grave/Knap Hill complex at Alton Barnes.   These linked natural images running across the entire Pewsey Downs chain would have been seen as a stunning manifestation of her religion, appropriately forming the southern border of the entire Avebury complex.

 3.   I would like to point out that if you draw a line from Avebury Henge and extend this line through West Kennet Long Barrow, you will come to the Alton Barnes Goddess.   These linked monuments represent a massive sacred landscape with clear thematic consistencies, for example Avebury Henge contains the Vulva Stone, West Kennet Long Barrow displays the Vulva carving on Stone 45, culminating with the enormous land sculpture of the pregnant Goddess here at Alton Barnes, all monuments broadly in a line, with distinctly feminine/maternal concerns!