Friday Slide Scan #30 is from a 1988 visit to Avebury, a place in England with standing stones, not too far from Stonehenge and a much nicer place to visit.
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Stonehenge has just had too many tourists for too many years; it’s fenced-off, crowded, bus-infested. Avebury is relatively untroubled, you’re free to wander around the stones, lean up against them, whatever. The little town of Avebury, more or less in the center of the stones, is well-supplied with New Age nonsense and perfectly decent pubs and tea-rooms. Many many years ago I once stayed in a B&B in the town and drank oceans of beer with the friendly locals at the local.
There is approximately zero historical evidence about who erected the stones or why they did it. Which doesn’t matter; they make an impression still, and there’s understanding in just touching one. If you had the opportunity to help build such a thing, how could you not?
Images in the Friday Slide Scans are from 35mm slides taken between 1953 and 2003 by (in rough chronological order) Bill Bray, Jean Bray, Tim Bray, Cath Bray, and Lauren Wood; when I know exactly who took one, I’ll say; in this case, me. Most but not all of the slides were on Kodachrome; they were digitized using a Nikon CoolScan 4000 ED scanner and cleaned up by a combination of the Nikon scanning software and PhotoShop Elements.
