What's it like: You can walk right up to the stones at Avebury - unlike Stonehenge (227) where it's all cordoned off and reverential, Avebury is very informal. It's spread out, so you don't get the visual impact that Stonehenge provides, but it's all the better for being something you can touch.
Where: Wiltshire, England
When: March 2014
How: It's a long story: Pete and I joined the National Trust in 2013 but had failed to get any value out of our membership as we never went anywhere. So I started a blog - National Trust Scones - to force us to get out and about and visit a few places. Avebury is a National Trust property - read about the Avebury scones - plus it was one of the 50 places that made it into the Book of Scones, a book that the NT published using excerpts from the blog. We drove there for the day and thought it was well worth the trip.
Worth noting: Silbury Hill is also worth a visit - it's only a couple of miles away and it's the tallest prehistoric man-made mound in Europe. Nobody knows why it was created.
Place in the 2015 edition: 404
Did it deserve to lose its place in the 2020 top 500: I'm not sure. It's an impressive place but not as impressive as some of the others.
