The Red Lion is the only pub in the world that stands inside a stone circle. Its tables sit within the Neolithic henge at Avebury, and one of them is the glass cover over an 86-foot well, which is where you'll be eating if you get that seat. The building started as a farmhouse in the late 16th century and has been a pub since 1802. It is also, by reputation, one of the most haunted in the country. The food is a Chef & Brewer menu of pub classics, a Sunday roast reviewers keep coming back for, and specials that have included Korean chicken and a duck-leg dish. The sticky toffee pudding gets singled out. Dogs are welcome, and there's a beer garden with local cask ales.
A mile west at Beckhampton, the Waggon and Horses is a 16th-century thatched coaching inn on the old Bath Road, now a Wadworth carvery with a children's play area. It has a sarsen stone in its fabric, believed quarried at Avebury, and a literary footnote: Charles Dickens used it as the model for the inn in "The Bagman's Tale" in The Pickwick Papers.
For everything else, the Old Farmyard is where you head. The National Trust shop sells plants, fudge, and locally crafted things — recycled silver jewellery, soaps, candles. Next to it, Circles Café does pasties, jacket potatoes, soup and children's lunchboxes. Cobblestones Bookshop occupies an old stables and takes its name from the cobbled floor still underfoot; the stock runs from classic fiction to cookery and gardening. There's a community shop and post office on the High Street. For a village of 582 people, the coverage is generous.
Getting here means driving — there's no railway, and Swindon, eleven miles off, is the nearest mainline station. The number 42 bus links Marlborough and Calne, Monday to Saturday, never on a Sunday.
The stones themselves are free, unfenced, and open. You can walk among them, climb the banks, and picnic where you like — the quieter north-west sector is the one to aim for. This is the largest stone circle in the world: a bank-and-ditch henge about 420 metres across, once holding around 98 sarsen stones, some over 40 tons.
Much of what you see is the work of one man. Alexander Keiller, heir to the Dundee marmalade firm, bought some 950 acres from 1925, re-erected buried stones and marked the sites of lost ones. In 1938 he found a skeleton beneath a toppled megalith, buried with three silver coins from around 1320 and a pair of iron scissors — an itinerant barber-surgeon, it seems, crushed while helping bring the stone down.
The antiquary John Aubrey came upon the place while out hunting in 1649 and later told Charles II that "Avebury does as much exceed in greatness the so renowned Stonehenge, as a cathedral doeth a parish church."
The Church of St James stands just outside the henge, beside the manor. Its core is Anglo-Saxon, around the year 1000, and it holds a rare painted 15th-century rood loft — one of only about 24 left in Britain. Parishioners dismantled it and hid it behind plaster on the nave wall, where it lay forgotten for three centuries until a renovation in 1812 found it again, still painted, waiting behind the wall.