A photo care­fully angled to hide most of the tour­ists out­side West Ken­net Long Bar­row, because I hadn’t planned on writ­ing up the visit this way.

I decided to take some time to tour Ave­bury recently. Along the way I stopped off around Sil­bury Hill and took the short trek up to West Ken­net. It’s a long bar­row, a tomb dat­ing from the Stone Age. Effect­ively it’s a house of the dead. Huge stones were used to build a long nar­row pas­sage­way with side cham­bers and then the whole thing was covered in earth. They’re strange places because rather than each cham­ber being for an indi­vidual or a fam­ily, it seems to have been a type of bone. So people’s fore­arms were put together in one place, ribs in another and so on. Com­ing up on this day I noticed the out­side had quite a large num­ber of vis­it­ors out­side. I found out why when I went to go inside. A group were try­ing to have a col­lect­ive chant in there.

My rela­tion­ship with pagans is mixed. I think the New Age is a tri­umph of mar­ket­ing to the gull­ible. If sac­red sites tap into earth ener­gies then why, I would like to know, haven’t the Elec­tri­city Board built a power sta­tion on one of them? I know a few Pagans who would agree because being a Pagan is rather like being a Chris­tian in that while it may be an irra­tional belief, you don’t have to be uni­formly stu­pid to be a Pagan (again rather like being a Chris­tian, it helps, but that’s a cheap shot).

I know there are people who resent the Pagan appro­pri­ation of monu­ments. Some­times these are people who visit the sites them­selves, but it’s not neces­sary. A lot of pagan-bashing is cheer­fully unin­formed by exper­i­ence. But I’m not usu­ally too bothered by whether or not Pagan­ism is mod­ern or not. The major­ity of Pagans have huge respect for these sites and are bet­ter informed, if occa­sion­ally eccent­ric­ally so, than the aver­age per­son about these sites. While I don’t agree with the act­ive spir­itu­al­ity of the sites I can respect someone who does care for a site and tries to ensure they leave the pre­his­toric sites unharmed. Which is more than you can say about some archae­olo­gists. It’s no more laugh­able than Chris­ti­ans who build gift shops in their cathed­rals, though to be fair it might have just been moneylenders that Baby Jesus threw out of the temple. The point I’m long-windedly mak­ing is that Pagans are not inher­ently laughable.

But West Ken­net is small. Only so many people can fit in. When a lot of these people are on hol­i­day for dis­tant places, I think it is worth ridicul­ing people who spend at least half an hour filling the bar­row and hum­ming to com­mune with ener­gies. It might not be polite, but then neither is bar­ring other people from shar­ing the exper­i­ence of the site to sat­isfy your own woolly-brained yearn­ings. So I don’t apo­lo­gise for over-acting and berat­ing some half-wits for chant­ing against the energy flow. “Are you com­pletely stu­pid? You’re facing the wrong dir­ec­tion. Carry on like that and you’ll irre­par­ably dam­age the vibrations.”

How­ever in ret­ro­spect it prob­ably was wrong of me to add “Now you’re going to have to start all over again.” So my apo­lo­gies to the tourists.