Chronicle (1966)

Sacred Rings (1980x4)

: 21, 1980

Almost 5,000 years ago, at Avebury, hundreds of people struggled for decades to build the great stone circles. In Scotland, centuries later, small family groups banded together to build a circle each. Stone circles are monuments to a lost religion, born of fear, in times of hardship and pestilence. Human bones and objects of value were buried within them, to placate the underworld. Traces of fire are found, as if from a pyre, and the builders of the circles watched the sun and the moon rise and set above the stones as part of their worship. AUBREY BURL has spent his life studying stone circles and their meaning. This film shows him at work in Aberdeenshire excavating the site where a small circle once stood and contrasts the evidence there with that found at Avebury in Wiltshire, one of the greatest prehistoric monuments in the world. Stone circles will always remain mysterious. But, if all the evidence is taken into account, they need no longer be mystifying as well.