Silbury Hill at Sunset - a photo on Flickriver

photo

Lordy - another picture of Silbury Hill

A view from the carpark on the old A4.

See www.flickr.com/photos/another-partial-success/2053397570/
for my other Silbury picture!

Archaeologists calculate that Silbury Hill was built about 4750 years ago and that it took 18 million man-hours, or 500 men working 15 years to build it. Why did they build it? Who knows.

After so much tampering and destruction in the name of science, this significant and sacred site has at long last been stabilised thanks to the work of English Heritage in late 2007.

A beautiful place which causes wonder and marvel to all who see it.

For more details en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silbury_hill - extracts from this below relating to the danger this historic site faces from modern man.

The base of the hill is circular and 167 m (550 ft) in diameter. The summit is flat-topped and 30 m (100 ft) in diameter. A smaller mound was first constructed, and in a later phase much enlarged. The initial structures at the base of the hill were perfectly circular and surveying reveals that the centre of the flat top and the centre of the cone that describes the hill, lie within a metre of one another

There have been several excavations of the mound, which attracted the notice of the seventeenth-century antiquary John Aubrey, whose notes in his Monumenta Britannica have not yet been published.[4]. Later, William Stukeley wrote that a skeleton and bridle had been discovered during tree planting on the summit in 1723. It is probable that this was a later, secondary burial, however. The first purposeful excavation came when a team of Cornish miners led by the Duke of Northumberland sunk a shaft from top to bottom in 1776. In 1849 a tunnel was dug from the edge into the centre. Other excavations were undertaken in 1867 and 1886, and William Flinders Petrie investigated the hill after the First World War.

In 1968-70 professor Richard J. C. Atkinson undertook work at Silbury which was shown on BBC television. This excavation revealed most of the environmental evidence known about the site including the remains of winged ants which indicate that Silbury was begun in an August. Atkinson dug numerous trenches at the site and reopened the 1849 tunnel, where he found material suggesting a Neolithic date, although none of his radiocarbon dates are considered reliable by modern standards. He argued that the hill was constructed in steps, each tier being filled in with packed chalk, and then smoothed off or weathered into a slope. Others [5] have identified a spiral path climbing to the top and consider the construction to have been incremental; the path provided a processional route to the summit.

Few prehistoric artefacts have ever been found on Silbury Hill: at its core there is only clay, flints, turf, moss, topsoil, gravel, freshwater shells, mistletoe, oak, hazel, sarsen stones, ox bones, and antler tines. Roman and medieval items have been found on and around the site since the nineteenth century and it seems that the hill was reoccupied by later peoples.

After heavy rains in May 2000, a collapse of the 1776 excavation shaft caused a hole to form in the top of the hill. English Heritage undertook a seismic survey of the hill to identify the damage caused by earlier excavations and determine the hill's stability. Repairs were undertaken; however, the site remains closed to the public.

English Heritage's archaeologists also excavated two further small trenches as part of the remedial work and made the important discovery of an antler fragment, the first from a secure archaeological context at the site. This produced a reliable radiocarbon date of c. 2490-2340 BC, dating the second mound convincingly to the Late Neolithic. Other recent work has focused on the role of the surrounding ditch which may not have been a simple source of chalk for the hill but a purpose-built water-filled barrier placed between the hill and the rest of the world.

In March 2007, English Heritage announced that a Roman village the size of 24 football pitches had been found at the foot of Silbury Hill. It contained regularly laid out streets and houses. [6]

On 11 May 2007, Skanska, under the direction of English Heritage, began a major programme of stabilisation, filling the tunnels and shafts from previous investigations with hundreds of tonnes of chalk. At the same time a new archaeological survey was conducted using modern equipment and techniques.[7] The work finished in Spring 2008: a "significant" new understanding of the monument's construction and history had been obtained.[8]

Taken in: United Kingdom / England / Avebury (show map)

Taken on: February 14, 2004

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Sets appears in: • Avebury and Surroundings • All the Canon Powershot A40

Groups appears in: • The Avebury Temple Complex • ridgeway more » • Pagan Images of Wiltshire, Gloucestershire & Bristol « less

Camera: Canon PowerShot A40, f/4.8, 1/25 sec, 16.2mm (more info) (hide info)

Camera:	Canon PowerShot A40
Aperture:	f/4.8
Exposure Time:	0.04 sec (1/25)
Focal Length:	16.2mm
Exposure Bias:	0 EV
Flash:	Off, Did not fire
Exposure Mode:	Auto
Metering Mode:	Multi-segment
White Balance:	Auto
Color Space:	Unknown (-1)
Software:	Adobe Photoshop Elements 4.0.1 Macintosh
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