Sketch & Poem

The earliest painting to combine Stonehenge and Avebury and the earliest surviving sketch of Stonehenge by a woman.
Of those personal connections with prehistoric monuments recalled through sketches and words, examples highlighting individual engagement by women before the middle of the nineteenth century are only rarely encountered. The earliest known at present descends from a widely respected botanist with a reputation for cultivating rare and curious plants: Anna Maria Benett of Norton Bavant. Anna was the younger sister of the renowned first woman geologist Etheldred Benett (1775-1845), supplier in 1831 of the catalogue of fossils for Sir Richard Colt Hoare's Modern Wiltshire (1822-44). Unlike the collecting of such as shells and ferns which were seen as a suitable pursuit, women were not ushered into active membership of the natural history societies. Unfairly disadvantaged by being not only women but unmarried, Anna and Etheldred were beacons of resistance to the prejudices of their age.
The breeze is whispering o’er the cold grey stone
Like murmurs low a tale of olden days;
My ear could fancy mid its dreary tone,
I list such songs a Druid’s voice might raise:
Hymned to the fancied deities among
Their giant altars on the lonely heath,
But brighter days have hushed the Druid’s song,
And hillocks point where Druids sleep beneath;
There’s tinkling music heard upon the plain,
For flocks are browzing where the victims bled:
And God is worshipped in a Christian’s fane
O blest the day when superstition fled
And mystic rites no more their terrors shed!
Anna Maria Benett (1776-1857)
Caption: Brian Edwards