Way back when, a long time ago, we were building chicken houses.

Now it's easy to build a chicken house, you just sit your chicken in the middle of where the house is going to be and then you drive a post in the ground at a suitable radius. Now the chicken will look at the post and then it will turn its head. But when a chicken turns its head it doesn't do it smoothly, it will turn its head with a short jerky movement.

So you drive another post in the ground where the chicken is looking now. Then you wait for the chicken to turn its head again and drive another post in the ground right at the spot the chicken is looking at. And you keep doing this all around in a circle.

The chicken can't see the gaps between the posts 'cos it looks at the first post and then turns its head with a jerk and then it sees another post and so on. So you have effectively trapped the chicken in its pen, because it can't see the spaces between the posts.   

We started off by building our chicken houses out of wood, but folks would come and chop up the posts for firewood so we had to resort to building them out of stone. You can still see a few of them left dotted around the English countryside.

Now we didn't call them hen houses because they didn't have a roof so we called them hen places or hen worlds. Our word for world back then was Gee, you see it used today in words like geode and geography. That one that's still standing on Salisbury plain was called Stone Hen Gee which got shortened over the years to Stone Henge. You will notice that the stones are quite close together compared to the one at Avebury just a few miles up the road.

I don't know why archaeologists haven't figured out what it was. They come up with all sorts of crackpot theories like it was a temple or an observatory or a calendar.

But its true use is quite clear from its name, its a hen house "Stone Hen world".

And the one at Averbury, that name is quite clear too if you just think about it a little.

Folks to this day still call a bird house an Aviary which is simply derived from the name Avebury.