went to Marlborough on holiday and visited Silbury Hill and Avebury for the first time. This ancient landscape with its neolithic monuments and standing stones "excited and fascinated" Nash and stirred "his sensitiveness to magic and the sinister beauty of monsters" according to Ruth Clarke who had accompanied him to Marlborough. Nash went on to paint the landscape at Avebury several times in different styles, most notably in his two 1934 paintings, Druid Landscape and Landscape of the Megaliths. The 1935 painting Equivalents for the Megaliths stresses the mystery of the site by portraying it in an abstract manner rather than a more literal depiction. Nash appears to have been unhappy with the restoration work, started in 1934, at Avebury by Alexander Keiller, seemingly preferring the previous wilder and more unkept appearance of the area. Nash wanted to move to live in Wiltshire but instead he left Rye for London in November 1933 before the Nashes undertook a long trip to France, Gibraltar and north Africa. When they returned to England in June 1934, the Nashes rented a cottage on the Dorset coast near Swanage. Nash was asked by John Betjeman to write a book in the Shell Guides series. Nash accepted and undertook writing a guide to Dorset. Swanage Between 1934 and 1936 Nash lived near Swanage in Dorset, hoping the sea air would ease his asthma whilst he worked on the Shell Guide to Dorset. He produced a considerable number of paintings and photographs during this period, some of which he used in the guide book. The guide was published in 1935 and featured some peculiarities of landscape and architecture that are often overlooked. Nash found Swanage with its diverse flora and fauna, fossils and geology to have certain Surrealist qualities. In a 1936 essay, entitled Swanage or Seaside Surrealism, he wrote that the place had something "of a dream image where things are so often incongruous and slightly frightening in their relation to time or place." Whilst there Nash met the artist Eileen Agar. The two began a relationship, which lasted some years, and also collaborated on a number of works together. In Swanage, Nash produced some notable surrealist works such as Events on the Downs, a picture of a giant tennis ball and a tree trunk seemingly embarking on a journey together and, later, Landscape from a Dream, a cliff-top scene with a hawk and mirror.