Silbury Hill |
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Silbury Hill is a man-made chalk mound in the Kennett Valley near Avebury in the county of Wiltshire. It is close to the A4, also the route of a Roman road which runs between Beckhampton and West Kennett. Silbury Hill which stands 130 ft (39.6 metres) high, covers about 5 acres (0.020 km2), is the tallest prehistoric human-made mound in Europe and one of the largest in the world, it is similar in size to some of the smaller Egyptian pyramids of the Giza Necropolis. The base of the hill is perfectly round and 550 ft (167 metres) in diameter. The summit is flat-topped and 98 ft (30 metres) in diameter. Silbury Hill is part of the complex of the Stonehenge, Avebury and Associated Sites UNESCO World Heritage Site and is one of the Neolithic monuments around Avebury, including the Avebury Ring and West Kennet Long Barrow. There are several other Neolithic monuments in the area, including Stonehenge. Archaeologists calculate that Silbury Hill was built about 4600 years ago (2400 BC) and that it took 18 million man-hours, or 500 men working 15 years to deposit and shape 8,800,000 cu ft (248,000 cubic metres) of earth and fill on top of a natural hill. There have been three excavations of the mound: the first when a team of Cornish miners led by the Duke of Northumberland sunk a shaft from top to bottom in 1776, another in 1849 when a tunnel was dug from the edge into the centre, and a third in 1968-70 when professor Richard Atkinson had another tunnel cut into the base. Nothing has 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. According to legend, this is the last resting place of a King Sil, represented in a lifesize gold statue and sitting on a fabled golden horse. A local legend noted in 1913 states that the Devil was carrying a bag of soil to drop on the citizens of Marlborough, but he was stopped by the priests of nearby Avebury. In 1861 it was reported that hundreds of people from Kennett, Avebury, Overton and the neighbouring villages thronged Silbury Hill every Palm Sunday. |
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