A Brief History of Avebury Camp

This is from memory, so some of the dates may be wrong.

Students from my evening class have been visiting Avebury with me each Summer Solstice since 1978. Originally, Avebury was a parents' and children's one-day coach-trip on the Sunday nearest the solstice. With my partner, Ann, I would sit among the stones and have a picnic with my children.

My evening class students decided to set up RAG in 1985.

Lionel and I met up for the first time in 1987, and shortly afterwards gave me a part-time job at UEL. He began joining us at Avebury  from 1988. His first walk and talk may have been in 1990, inspired largely by Michael Dames' book, "The Avebury Circle".

The Barking Bateria was formed ten years later, in the autumn of 1996.

The following summer, we decided for the first time to camp in a field near Avebury for a few days. That same year, if I remember right, we began performing with fire torches and the samba band at Avebury Circle on Midsummer's Eve, with Vicky Meyer as mestre. Stonehenge was then completely out of bounds, with a twelve mile exclusion zone around it, imposed by Thatcher during the 1984/1985 miners' strike and retained by the Wiltshire Police ever since.

I began attending meetings of the Stonehenge Campaign in North London in 1999, meeting King Arthur for the first time and forming a good friendship. Soon after I began attending, I learned that the European Court of Human Rights had just ruled in favour of Arthur's right as a Druid to worship in the Inner Temple during the Summer Solstice. I suggested to Arthur that the Barking Bateria might be honoured to serve at Stonehenge as the King's Drums. I knew that that way, we could probably get our fire-torches in without the police confiscating them. At first, the King's Drums performed at Avebury; but in 1999 we knew that the police, English Heritage and the National Trust would be obliged to let us reclaim Stonehenge itself.

Chris Knight, April 2005