You can hike Europe’s oldest continuously-used trail—here's how

The stone circle of Avebury is baking in the afternoon sun, as it has done for 4,600 summers. Its giant standing stones burst through the grass; their surfaces chipped in places and time-smoothed in others. Twelve feet tall, together they resemble a giant's gap-toothed grin.

Avebury, home to the world’s largest prehistoric stone circle, is one of the most significant Neolithic sites in Britain — but it’s only the starting point of a remarkable collection of prehistoric monuments clustered along the Ridgeway, an ancient walking route often described as Britain’s oldest road. Running along the chalk hills of southern England for 87 miles from Overton Hill, near Avebury, in Wiltshire to Ivinghoe Beacon in Buckinghamshire, it has been used by cattle drovers, traders, pilgrims and wanderers for more than 5,000 years, and still attracts hikers and seekers of the spiritual in equal measure.  I grew up near Avebury and have walked the Ridgeway countless times, including its full length in one go — a journey of about a week. This time, though, I’m just spending a couple of days walking the western part of the trail, from Avebury to Uffington, where the bulk of the route’s prehistoric sites are concentrated.

Avebury’s shops sell everything a wizard in walking boots might need: protective Horned God pendants, guidebooks to shamanic medicine, aura sprays for clearing negative energy. In the Henge Shop, I'm admiring a calendar of the crop circles that decorate the North Wessex hillsides each summer, when something catches my eye: an assemblage of handmade druid staffs, carved from native wood and topped with glinting precious stones.

“This one’s birch with a quartz crystal — great for higher-frequency work,” says the shop’s events coordinator, Kelly Findlay, handing me a sturdy, gnarled staff topped with an iridescent gemstone. “Oh yes,” she says, nodding approvingly. “Very Gandalf.”

My budget doesn't quite extend to a proper druid’s staff, but no matter; it's easy to imagine my cheap aluminium walking pole topped with a crystal, gnarled with knots and entwined with vines as I stomp out along the trail. That's what the Ridgeway does: it stirs the imagination. “There's a special energy about this place, with more and more people coming here and questioning things,” says Kelly. “And it's good to question things.”

I walk for half an hour up a grassy hill to the West Kennet Long Barrow, a Bronze Age burial chamber that was already 1,000 years old when Avebury’s stone circle was being built. Ducking past the large boulders that flank the entranceway, I stand in the cool of the tomb and notice bundles of dried herbs and half-melted candles left as votive offerings in cracks in the stone — even today, this is a sacred place for Druids, Wiccans and other neopagans.

To the south leads a path known as the Avenue, lined with yet more towering sarsen stones. Here I meet a fellow walker, a woman with blonde curls and a Stonehenge tattoo, who is walking around a standing stone holding a bent copper pipe. Maria Wheatley is a second-generation dowser and geomancer, who uses dowsing rods to detect energies in the landscape — and, she says, they radiate particularly strongly in this part of the world. "In the very early days, the Ridgeway was trodden out by aurochs, huge cattle who were following an energy current," she says. “The track came first, then all the monuments were built. The stones draw the energy up from the earth and transmit it." Maria invites me to give dowsing a try, and hands me her rod, which begins to spin around in circles as I approach the stone. “There's an outpouring here; a vortex of energy," she says. “It's good for your blood pressure, and all sorts.”

Feeling suitably relaxed, I continue along the trail, a white ribbon of chalk rupturing the earth like a dragon’s spine. Barley shimmers in the fields. Pink-spotted orchids blossom at the feet of hedgerows. Electric-blue butterflies flutter ahead of me on the path, and the bright sky is a chorus of skylarks and linnets. I stop to take shade in the many clumps of beech trees that line the path, sprouting from ancient tumuli, until I come across another feature of the Ridgeway landscape: a white horse carved into the chalk hillside. There are nine such horses in the area, and this one, the Hackpen White Horse, isn’t the finest example of the genre. Carved by a parish clerk in 1838, it’s awkwardly rendered and looks more like a flailing greyhound than a prancing mare. Still, it’s a manifestation of whatever spirit has long compelled people to imprint this landscape with works of art. In addition to the white horses, countless crop circles appear in these fields each summer. These elaborate, psychedelic patterns are the work of human artists, but that doesn't dissuade a vibrant community of crop circle researchers from attempting to prove extraterrestrial or paranormal theories.

After nine miles on the trail, evening is drawing in, and I pitch my tent in the quiet village of Ogbourne St George. I wake early to a blushing dawn and a chirruping chorus of thrushes and yellowhammers, quietly pack up and set off again. This is a remote day’s walking, high up on the ridge. Ancient trackways often followed elevated routes like this to avoid the dangerous lowland forests, where bandits and wolves lay waiting.

Thankfully no such dangers await the modern walker on the Ridgeway, although the path’s atmosphere is sometimes potent enough to have you looking over your shoulder. After 10 miles of tramping through hilltop fields and hedgerow avenues, my boots accumulating an ever-thickening dusting of chalk, the path leads me to Wayland’s Smithy, a Neolithic long barrow in a quiet copse of beech trees. I can’t shake a feeling that many other people have reported here: one of being watched. Whisperings echo through my mind of the occult rituals still said to be performed here on moonlit evenings, and I slip back onto the path, walking a further mile to a place with a much lighter, though no less mysterious, energy.

The Uffington White Horse is a 3,000-year-old rendering of a prancing horse, carved into a hilltop and filled with white chalk. Measuring 110 metres in length and 40 metres in height, it’s perfectly proportioned — an early masterpiece of abstract art. As I sit on the hillside marvelling at its genius, I can’t help wondering if it was inspired by the same creative spirit which moved ancient builders to create the Ridgeway’s other remarkable monuments — and which still draws walkers and pilgrims to Britain's oldest footpath after more than 5,000 years.