Silbury Hill mystery soon to be resolved

Source: Telegraph.co.uk

It is said that there is a greater concentration of ancient monuments in the Wiltshire countryside between Marlborough and Avebury than anywhere else in Britain. Many present an eternal puzzle to archaeologists as to how and why they came to be, but Silbury Hill out-puzzles them all. There it sits by the A4, an outlandish sight dwarfing the cars that stream past its circular base. It is 30-metres high and 160-metres wide, the largest man-made mound in Europe, but in silhouette it looks like an alien spaceship from a Fifties sci-fi movie.

It is, in fact, more than 4,000 years old (c2,400-2,000BC), and its purpose has been a well-kept secret for at least half that time. Suggestions range from the legendary, to the barmy, to the halfway plausible. One has it that the devil built it to hide a gold statue while on the way, for some unknown reason, to Devizes, another that it was the resplendent burial chamber of the mythical warrior king Sil and his horse. There are connections with Arthurian legends, and then there is a hypothesis that, because of high levels of contamination of the water supply by grazing sheep, it formed a kind of reservoir of pure water, with rainfall percolating through its chalk structure to gather in the surrounding ditch. This one sounds practical until you learn that its making would have involved more than four million man-hours and 500,000 tonnes of material quarried from ditches and terraces, carried out over at least 200 years.

Silbury Hill is in the guardianship of English Heritage, in whose laboratories recent fascinating new finds are being investigated. Several years ago, a hole appeared at the summit of the Neolithic monument, around the spot where the Duke of Northumberland had sunk a shaft to carry out excavations in 1776. Further investigation showed that other tunnels from later digs were also unstable. Contracting a team of engineers to stabilise the internal structure also provided a chance to gain a greater insight into date and function. The work was only completed last winter, but while it could take two years to fully evaluate the finds, it seems Silbury had a part to play in later history that no one had hitherto imagined.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/gardening/4385933/Silbury-Hill-mystery-soon-to-be-resolved.html

This one (That is the theory of it providing pure, drinkable water) sounds practical until you learn that its making would have involved more than four million man-hours and 500,000 tonnes of material quarried from ditches and terraces, carried out over at least 200 years.


Some people will do anything for some good designer water.

:spray: