Silbury Hill forum 180 room
Image by Meic
Silbury Hill

(sil)barry white

close
more_vert

As Ish states, the experimental earthwork on Overton Down started going green within weeks, incidentally I could be wrong but I think the EE is 50 next year !

Anyway, it was Caroline malone I think that first came out with the white Silbury business, its in that EH book on Avebury that was put to the sword by one review I recall. She is now a big noise in the British Museum.

Incidentally, some idiot at the council deciuded to remove the old sign posts at Wymans Hill (Windmill Hill) and substituted that sort of formica look-a-like signs with black etched in names for the old wooden board - within a few weeks it was green, and I passed it this morning and it had gone black.

VBB

Did you stop to note the huge holes that have appeared in the fence around Silbury ?
Easy access for all eh?
Maybe it was the sheep escaping?

I was much taken by the white Silbury notion, but no more. Caroline Malone's book has come in for some stick, but she clearly states that the white chalk steps were deliberately infilled with silt. If it really was silt then it would have been fertile and would soon have grown lush grass. So looks like it went green much quicker than bare chalk would have done.

White Silbury is getting dismissed too readily I reckon. Do we know, for sure, there was never a time when it wasn't white? Or that white was never part of an intention, at any time? One thing we do know - they kept changing their minds.

Is an intention to scour so unthinkable? (Wot about the White Horses then?). Do we know how labour intensive it is, and whether if they did it for a short while there would be identifiable marks? Maybe they tried it for a few months, found it hard and said sod this we'll change the plan, let's cover it? (Are the dampers on the Millenium Bridge part of the builders' ritual intention?)

So is there a case for saying we should recapture their Oh-so-short-lived original intention for them? (I'm not really advocating skinning it, but there's only one thing we know with reasonable certainty about what they intended - to make people go Wow! Making it white might not recapture the physical reality but it wouldn't half recreate the emotional one.)