Wiltshire

One day in October 1916 Edith Olivier was travelling from Devizes to Swindon and was approaching Avebury. She passed through a succession of huge stone megaliths and at the end of the avenue on which they were sited left her car to climb the earth mound which is the centrepiece of that ancient site.

As she did so she discovered that a fair was under way. In her book Without Knowing Mr Walkiey, Edith Olivier describes how the cottages and stone megaliths were obscured by failing light and falling rain, but that both were lit by the torches and flares from the fair’s booths and shows. She describes coconut shies, swingboats, and the crowd of fairgoers.

When the rain falling down the back of her neck had become uncomfortable she got into her car and drove away. It was some years later when she discovered that the fair at Avebury, which had once been an annual event, had been abolished in 1850, over 60 years before she saw it; indeed her vision appears to have shown her an even earlier time than that, as the megaliths she had seen in the avenue approaching Avebury disappeared sometime before the turn of the nineteenth century.

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