Tuesday 28 August 2007

The marmalade megaliths

What do Seville and Avebury have in common? Marmalade of course. Alexander Keiller, heir to a great marmalade fortune (as in Keillor's marmalade of Dundee), is the reason why the West Kennet Avenue series of stones at Avebury are now standing. Introduced to archeaology by his second wife, Keillor excavated and re-erected the West Kennet Avenue in the late 1930s, buying up land in and around the village.
Paul Nash, another 'discoverer' of the stones in the 1930's, was less impressed by Keillor's re-erection, claiming that it had robbed the site of its presence and power. Another critic derided it as "megalithic landscape gardening". When Nash found the site:
"the great stones were in their wild state, so to speak. Some were half covered by the grass, others stood up in cornfields or were entangled and overgrown in the copses, some were buried under the turf. But they were wonderful and disquieting, and as I saw them then, I shall always remember them. Very soon afterwards the big work of reinstating the Circles and Avenues began, so that to a great extent that primal magic of the stones’ appearance was lost." Paul Nash, (1951) Fertile Image, London, p.11
Revisiting the site in 1938, Nash reiterates his stance:
"Avebury may rise again under the tireless hand of Mr. Keiller, but it will be an archaeological monument, as dead as a mammoth skeleton in the Natural History Museum. When I stumbled over the sarsens in the shaggy autumn grass and saw the unexpected megaliths reared up among the corn stooks, Avebury was still alive." Paul Nash, ‘Landscape of the Megaliths’, Art and Education, March 1939, p.8.

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