Silbury Hill

I am not sure my posts are worthy of posting on such an esteemed blog, but I will share with you a recent blog post that my readers enjoyed.

The May edition of Heritage Today has a very interesting article on the latest discoveries regarding the mysterious Silbury Hill. The hill is near Marlborough just on the edge of the A4.

In 2000 a large hole opened up and archaeologists and engineers teamed up to find a solution. The hole was caused by a shaft that had been sunk by the Duke of Northumberland in 1776. Furthermore the soil was seeping into various tunnels that had been channeled into the hill over the years. The largest tunnel was created by Professor Richard Atkinson in 1968. The BBC sponsored him to carry out the dig and Magnus Magnusson presented a programme from within. The entrance can be seen in the following picture (from Heritage Today magazine). To repair the hill all the voids had to be filled from the middle outwards with bags of chalk followed by a chalk and water mixture. The door to the entrance has now been placed in the nearby Alexander Keiller Museum in Avebury.

There have been many theories as to the significance of the hill; burial chamber for an ancient king, a platform for druid sacrifices and astronomical observatory are among the suggestions. The stabilising of the structure enabled archaeologists to shed a bit more light on the hill. It is now certain that there was no burial beneath the mound. A piece of pottery at the site has also established that the Romans had a settlement there.

Due to radiocarbon dating using pieces of antler it has now been established that the hill was started around 2400BC and probably went on for several hundred years. It is composed of a series of layers secured by stakes, then gradually built on top of. The mound eventually got covered by different layers of local material; clay, chalk, topsoil, turf and even some sarsen stones. Whilst looking in the main tunnel the archaeologists realised that the hill had started off as several mounds which later joined into the single mound, initially it stood 5 metres high. The mound grew to 25 metres high, the top part consisting of chalk that had been quarried from an adjacent ditch. At this stage it appears that the mound was left for a while as there is a layer soil showing signs that grass had colonised it. After this rest period more chalk was piled on top until the hill eventually stood at 37 metres high. It is the largest prehistoric mound in the whole of Europe that has been hand made by humans.

Click on photo for a larger view.

I shall leave you with the final paragraph from the article.

Silbury Hill has been called the British equivalent of the pyramids, but why did Stone Age man build it? Nobody knows, exactly. Quite apart from any ritualistic significance Silbury may have had for its builders, just constructing it would have been its own reward. Having such a great shared purpose would have helped the community to cohere. Perhaps future generations will say something similar of the people who came to repair the monument in the early twenty-first century. why has Silbury been mended? Because our nation is strengthened through doing it.

More interesting facts about the mound can be found on the Silbury Hill page of the English Heritage website.

Where Has James Gone?

James has gone on a travel adventure. One of the challenges will be to suppress his blog addiction. I doubt that it will be too long before he is amongst us again.

Where do you think he will pop up from next?

Click Here to take the survey

I will compile the results and post later.

Let's hope it is not like this.



Seems that James's blog readers are pretty discerning.

[hiatus] not for too long - farewell

Once I was crazy enough to try bobsleigh - well actually luge, feet first.

It's an interesting phenomenon - once you're over that lip at the top, there is only one way down and there is no choice but to lie back and let the skids become part of you, using miniscule bodyshifts to minimize bends, on e false move and I think you can imagine.

Therefore, even though the heart was doing awful things, you had to suppress it and get the breathing going for when you hit the compression bends. There was one particular bend to the left and I remember the overhanging trees as I came into a short straight and the skids came back to the fall line and picked up speed - you couldn't sneeze or move the head except to strain the eyes downwards but in so doing, this lost speed.

Fat lot that mattered to me, speed - perfectly happy to lop a few seconds off and live. Halfway down the straight and it became fairly obvious that ... er ... there was almost a right angle left at the end [or so it seemed] and to go from semi-vertical to semi-horizontal in a microsecond was going to do interesting things to the metabolism.

At this point I thought of putting the legs out to stop before the turn but then realized that the walls would snap the legs back behind me and anyway here it was ... aaagh. The turn was bad enough, crushing the chest but when I shot up to the ridge, hanging centrifugally before flattening out to the fall line again with the skids wobbling left and right, it seemed it might be a good idea to ... um ... stop if you don't mind ... please?

Vague feelings now of high up near the ridge on the left, snap back, high up on the right, back to the line and then the final drop where it felt like taking off before the tube became gradually shallow and then severely reversed upwards and the blades finally stopped.

Um ... right. Exhilarating? For some perhaps but you could keep it as far as I was concerned. Count me among the spineless please - I'd prefer not to meet my lunch coming up on my way down. With thoughts like these, the base of the chairlift was beckoning again and there was a free chair.

Seems to me there's a huge difference between you brave people who go on the Oblivion, Megaphobia and so on and actually trust the damned thing not to come off whilst you're flung out into space. In my case, it was always going to be in my hands what happened and somehow that was more comforting.

Tomorrow is entirely out of my hands.

I'd like to sign off now and hand over to Colin Campbell for some time, trusting and hoping you won't shun the blog but will come to read some of the guest posts. One way or another I'll let you know what happened. Thank you so much too, those friends who put up with the maudlin mood in the last few weeks and stuck with me.

Cheers and let's leave on a good note:

Thousands of private counselors are offering free services to troops returning from Iraq and Afghanistan with mental health problems, jumping in to help because the military is short on therapists.

Now that's altruism for you. So don't miss out - apply today.

[sunday notes] bumbling around, getting it done

As Russia sweeps to Eurovision victory, this blogger quietly exits [yes that visa came through] Good luck to Russia who sustained me for so many years. 99% of the population and I got on fine but unfortunately, the wrong 99%.

Sorry to disappoint but there'll be no cutting expose from Higham - time to move on to new disasters [no, no - good things]. This week sees the action. As it will be pretty busy the next few days, I might not pop up again in that time, if at all.

In the meanwhile, may I leave visitors to this site in the most capable administrative hands of Haggiso, aka Colin Campbell, whose job it is to keep a motley collection of guest posters roughly in line or indeed - even posting.

Actually, we have quite appropriate weather just now - bitter grey skies, intermittent rain, plus 7 degrees and a chilly wind. It's been like this for some days but hey, this is meant to be summer, you know.

The big ask

Tomorrow, between 10 a.m. and 12 a.m. London time my companion and I will pass through a most dangerous time and a number of things can and might go wrong which will change the game plan so significantly that I end up in a different country to the one I had in mind.

Now, there is a passage in Matt 18:19-20:

Again I say unto you, That if two of you shall agree on earth as touching any thing that they shall ask, it shall be done for them of my Father which is in heaven. For where two or three are gathered together in my name, there am I in the midst of them.

So, reading the fine print here, it needs a minimum of two together, it seems but whether that means two or three in collusion at the end of an e-mail or whether it means you have to be actually together is not clear, as Matt's internet connection was down at the time.

Well anyway, I'll leave that one up to you.

Meanwhile

May I recommend to the romantics amongst you [sorry to be sickening] not a bad profile of Kate Middleton, the latest Gordo bashing is not worth the effort on Positive Sunday, we needn't bother either with the Hillary stirring in Florida but tomorrow being Memorial Day, here are a few articles about it.

Let's remember all vets everywhere.

So, best head off as a few people will visit today and I have nothing to put on the table just now. Back later in the day.

Nuts From The Chipmunk's Pouch

Notwithstanding the amount of hostile press she generates (and, ahem, requests to blog about her), Hazel Blears is possibly one of the least interesting characters about whom one could find anything interesting to write. Vapid and immature, her utterances remind one of a review once given to the actress Trish Van Devere, that she was little more than 'a smiling hole in the air'.

However, last night a whopper of a nut fell out of the Chipmunk's pouch; and right on the Channel 4 News.

For what it's worth, my own analysis of the Crewe & Nantwich bye-election result is that it does represent a political paradigm shift. If you want to register a protest vote, go for the Lib Dems; the fact that the Tories got so big a swing would indicate that the people want change and, above all else, stabilitys-something they won't get from a party of alcoholic coprophiles.

When Jon Snow confronted her with the result, Blears started gabbling the usual litany of New Labour achievements; and one of them was the enactment of new rights for agency workers. She justified this by saying that it had been done 'to prevent wages being undercut by agency workers'. There is only one class of workers she could have been talking about; migrants.

Yes, folk, last night, unless my ears were greatly deceiving me, Hazel Blears as much as admitted that migrants have been driving down wages. It would be very interesting to hear the recording again in full. If what I can recall hearing is correct, the Chipmunk has managed to chew through the hull of the good ship New Labour far below the waterline, and has handed the Tories a majority of at least 100.

[perception] more vital than the reality

It's never actually your situation which counts but your perception of it.

At the blackest point today after that visa stupidity which kicks off again tomorrow at 11 a.m., this blogger was as low as he's felt for years and that was reflected in the last post.

Then came the prospect of one particular lady, well two actually, who not only dropped in and lifted the mood exponentially but got down to helping clear out the flat, did this, did that and all I had to give them was a tub of salad, sweets and tea - felt so guilty.

They made as if it was a monarch's repast and by various nuances, the solidity of their friendship really came home, to the point I just had to sign off tonight in a much more cheerful mood, coffee and whisky beside me.

Now I'm actually looking forward to the adventure.