ABSTRACT
Dr William Stukeley needs little introduction to the historian of antiquarianism in early modern Britain. Stukeley was a keen gardener who travelled extensively around England, viewing and recording his comments upon the natural and man-made landscapes he encountered. In the text to Stonehenge the reader was invited into the monument as if actually there: 'it is time to draw toward the sacred pile,' Stukeley wrote, 'and fancy ourselves walking upon this delightful plain.' Stukeley's Stonehenge and Avebury are both clearly interpreted as man-made landscapes, modelled with the explicit intention of acting upon and being interpreted by the knowledgeable spectator who interacted with the site as well as being a simple observer of it. The potential criticism that the Druids were known to have worshipped in groves and not stone circles posed no problem for Stukeley, for stones and trees were intricately linked in his theory of the origin of architecture.
