Avebury, Wiltshire, England, 9:45 a.m. Somewhere along the winding one-lane stretch past West Kennet, we made a wrong turn.
We watched from our passenger seat, squinting past the morning sun rays, as our friend Mankaran boldly swung a u-turn into a fenced-off frosted field speckled with sheep. Then we were back on course to the gravelled parking lot that borders the historic site. It sits far away from much else.
We killed Morrissey’s whining and the engine and the four of us stepped out into the English sun, knotting scarves around our necks and stretching our legs that had been cramped since Heathrow in silence.
Parking isn’t free. It’s the price you pay to walk the Avebury henge and stone circle without charge.
The metre was out of order.
“Way cheaper than Stonehenge,” our friend Shaeba said over her shoulder as we walked in a single file along a muddy path that opens up into one of the main squares of the national site.
The clearing was weathered but enraptured with a kind of stillness that seems to have protected the community from change for centuries. It's a sort of preservation that is both enchanting and comforting. To our left is Saint James Avebury Church. Across the way is the Alexander Keiller Museum. The village and its surrounding low lying hills were crusted with frost, just like back home when we left. But the way the green sprawled for miles was a new type of serene for us.
We’d been dreaming of England since high school. By last October, we finally had the footing (and the funds more or less) to start putting this trip, our own take of London on a budget, into motion. Escaping the city for a day trip into the countryside was just a natural part of that plan.
The Avebury henge and stone circles World Heritage Site dates back to the prehistoric Neolithic period, roughly between 2,850 and 2,200 BC. The rock formation encircles part of the village, and is one of multiple ceremonial Bronze Age sites in the area. Along with West Kennet Avenue, West Kennet Long Barrow, The Sanctuary, Windmill Hill and Silbury Hill, these sites are the remnants of what many historians believe was a sacred landscape.
So when Saint James Church was built to neighbour the stones in 1,000 AD, the Saxons strategically raised it there out of fear of the magical powers they believed the stone circles held, and sited their place of worship close by to counteract their supposed malice.
By noon the sun was up over our heads and we could see our breaths. The village came alive with young local families. Shadows from trees sheltered the bricked homes that line the only residential stretch of the town. Weather vanes and chimneys that have seen many winters sparkled above us as we meandered around the Saint James Cemetery, crossed more mudded paths and found our way into the centre of the henge.
The true depth of the Avebury circle cannot be grasped from the road. It takes standing in its centre to imagine generations of people brushing against these stones, sitting under the field’s trees, and pondering their purpose.
Back on the road, we zipped past Victorian-era cottages, taking in the scenery, where the nearest grocery store or medical clinic must be and asking how the hell you’re supposed to navigate British roundabouts.
By 12:30 p.m., everyone was too ashamed to admit we were behind schedule.
“We’re gonna make it, don’t worry,” Mankaran muttered, white-knuckling the wheel.
Shaeba was scrolling through cheap parkades in the city centre. “No, we’re no —”
“Yes hi, umm we have a reservation for 12:30 p.m. … it’s under Fiona … no this isn’t her,” Naz said into her cell from the back seat. “Yes, I’m just calling to let you know we might be running a little late.”
As half of us rushed into the café inside the Jane Austen Museum at the exact minute of our booking, the other two toured half of Bath in search of a spot to park, a venture that took us so long we got through half of Hozier’s Unreal Unearth: Unending.
High tea is one of the most expensive activities you can spend time and pounds on in England. Tea, finger sandwiches, crumpets and clotted cream can cost anywhere from £26 to £100 per person in Bath. But we couldn’t leave the country without this experience. So we carved an afternoon of this into our budget and it luckily, amounted to the lower end of the aforementioned range.
The Georgian building that houses the museum and café creaked and smelt of soured aged wood. As minuets hummed over the speakers, we passed around tea pots with our elbows on the table and inhaled over-powdered scones and sugary cakes. Etiquette was not our priority — we were all starving peckish for our sickly sweet afternoon tea.
What Bath is most known for is self-explanatory. The city is built around a massive Roman bath house. It’s over 2,000 years old, but well-preserved and steaming greenish spring water still runs through it so it was easy to imagine where the people of Roman Britain used to bathe and honour the goddess Sulis Minerva, who was believed to have lived in the depths of the springs.
In early January, the holidays were setting in Bath’s pedestrian-only centre. Christmas lights still strung overhead in narrow passages, a gigantic Christmas tree was ever-standing in front of the abbey and we dodged scurrying kids as they waited their turn on the merry-go-round in the square. Modern life blended effortlessly with Bath’s rich Georgian architectural heritage, creating an atmosphere that was both timeless and uniquely captivating.
People walked every which way, polyphonic music escaped into the air, old lights with bulbs that might need to be replaced soon, flickered — a type of imperfect liveliness that must have been recurring at this time every year for generations. The hustling tempo of this day and age was missing. And that probably never gets old.
We spent the last few dollars of our day’s budget on under-seasoned fish and chips we paid for at the counter at a pub that advertised discounted darts and beer as a weekday special.
As we loitered by the till and waited to make eye contact with the waiter, we caught our reflections in the mirror behind the kegs.
“I look like I haven’t slept in days,” one of us said, yawning. A Somerset tang filled the humid and heavy air in the room. The UK is eight hours ahead of the west coast. A week prior, this would have been considered an all-nighter on Pacific Standard Time.
Night fell and dim warm lights started to speckle the inside of the city’s restaurants and cafés, animated by shadows and the clicking of shoes at their cobblestoned entrances.
We were experiencing Bath looking from the outside in.
Exactly one person we interacted with asked where we are visiting from, a middle aged lady with glasses that pushed halfway down her nose who ran a shop of local knick knacks across from Pulteney Bridge.
“Bath is a special place. I’m glad you could make the trip,” she said, letting us linger for a few minutes past closing. We found cheeky greeting cards in the back of the store and learnt about their artist, a friend of the shopkeeper's, she explained, who is a local card marker.
Bath has a bedtime.
By the time we reached Lansdown Crescent Association, an imposing perimeter of Georgian townhouses that encircle an entire cul-de-sac, Bath retreated to its aging walls. The homes, designed by architect John Palmer during the city’s booming era, are guarded by fenced bridges. The sturdy walls of concrete block out the noise from the adjacent alleys. The air was so still the four of us felt the need to whisper, even though it was only 7 p.m.
“I can’t feel my hands,” one of us said as we walked in large huddled strides back to the car, waiting to overtake a group of people speaking Italian very loudly who took up the entirety of the sidewalk.
The moon followed us on our way back as we left Bath. The playlist shifted as Mankaran requested “NISSAN ALTIMA” to get us through our collective caffeine withdrawal. Our conversation subsided and the hum of the engine became the soundtrack to our journey back to Heathrow.
We blurred past the same villages we had ridden through that morning, which seemed like a different day ago. And we were moving so fast it felt like time travel. The 19th century scenery was suddenly replaced by overpasses and speed limit signs posted every other mile.
Somewhere along the stretch of highway, it hit us that today was never about being on schedule. It was about stepping into the timelessness of places like Avebury and Bath, where the past lingers in every stone, urging us to slow down and simply exist within it.
We returned the keys to the car rental just after 11 p.m. and shuffled down to the Tube with our hands shoved in our pockets, slumping in our seats on the train ride back and yearning for our beds, already blanketed in a dream-like state.
At 1 a.m., we stumbled onto the quiet steps of our Airbnb and the key keeper rummaged for them in her pocket. And we collapsed into the kind of silence that only comes after a day so full it feels like it spanned centuries.
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