Silbury

Back from Wiltshire now. It is a four hour drive away on a good run. There's so much I could blog about but I will begin with Silbury Hill.

Have you heard of it? On a woodland walk to the south of the county, we met a charming woman in her seventies. She was Wiltshire born and bred and well-spoken but had never heard of Silbury Hill until I mentioned it to her. Of course everybody has heard of Stonehenge - including the touring Canadian couple we met outside "The Royal Oak" in Swallowcliffe but they had also never heard of Silbury Hill.

I have known of it since teenhood . However, until yesterday, I had never seen the hill - the biggest man-made prehistoric mound in Europe.

I love the fact that nobody knows why it was built over a period of a hundred years between 2400 and 2300 BC. There are plenty of theories but it seems pretty certain that it was not a burial mound. Perhaps it was a ceremonial meeting place. It is estimated that it took eighteen million man hours to build and that 248,000 cubic metres of chalky earth were used. It stands about forty metres tall and covers an area of five acres.

You just shake your head in wonder and puzzlement. Maybe you close your eyes as you try to imagine the people of pre-Christian Britain and how they tried to make sense of the stars, the way that water welled from the ground, the clouds in the sky.

They embraced the unknown mystery of it all. In contrast, modern men dug tunnels into Silbury Hill in search of solutions and maybe treasure too. They didn't find these things and then typically they forgot to backfill their digs which later caused damage to the ancient hill. Earlier, Romans had also damaged it - building a settlement close by.

Below, is the only photo in the sequence that I did not take myself - an aerial shot of the mysterious mound though the top is surely not how it would have appeared in ancient times. I feel I ought to write a poem  about Silbury Hill and maybe I will. It is a special place and yet far less visited than Stonehenge which has become a "must see" attraction for millions.

from Yorkshire Pudding https://ift.tt/pmNOAKD