Last month I visited Avebury Stone Circle in Wiltshire, it has become something of an annual pilgrimage for me, sometimes arriving on foot from a nearby town or village but usually by bus …
On this visit I was pleasantly surprised to find that the National Trust gift shop had a new batch of postcards on their spinner that I had not seen before, in fact they have a copyright date of 2026, so new this year. Previously the gift shop had been selling Atmosphere Postcards, which I had picked up a while ago.
In total I found sixteen different cards, but I am not sure if that is the complete set. I didn’t check if there were any others for sale at Avebury Manor or the Alexander Keiller Museum because I had rather foolishly left my National Trust membership card at home and didn’t want to pay for admission.
There is a nice mix of subjects, a couple of the aforementioned Avebury Manor (which I am not so interested in but bought for completeness) and one the nearby Cherhill White Horse and Landsdowne Monument (the Monument is missing the cladding of scaffolding which currently adorns it, so not a recent image).
The rest of the postcards are elements of the stone circle or associated sites of interest. Probably my favourite card of the batch is the aerial photo, whilst the stones themselves are unchanging I find it interesting to see what else is going on around them.
The postcards themselves were reasonably priced at 60p each or three for £1.50, all images are in colour with a typical National Trust postcard back. Below is a list of the reference numbers and descriptions, if you find any I have missed please let me know.
| The south front of the house, probably built on the 1550s | NT20A95 |
| The stones and the Red Lion pub, a farmhouse until 1802 | NT20DCC |
| The largely mid-16th-century east front of the manor house | NT20HSN |
| Some of the largest boulders are 6 metres (20 feet) high | NT22ADY0 |
| The sarsen stones form a ring almost a mile in circumference | NT22ADYG |
| Some of the smaller stones; many were re-erected in the 1930s | NT22ADYN |
| A line of trees with gnarled, exposed rocks | NT22DFQW |
| About 30 of the 98 original stones were re-erected in the 1930s | NT22KJ7B |
| There were originally 98 unworked stones in the main circle | NT22KQ40 |
| The sarsen stones were collected from surrounding downland | NT22LKM0 |
| A circular bank and ditch enclose the remaining ring of sarsens | NT22MRPT |
| Sunset over the West Kennet Avenue | NT22V6EI |
| Frosty sunrise over a cluster of stones | NT2344FZ |
| The 1-mile West Kennet Avenue links Avebury and The Sanctuary | NT2344NF |
| The Cherhill White Horse and Lansdowne Monument of 1845 | NT234EAJ |
| The World Heritage Site stone circle at dawn | NT2NINT |
