The <b>What did Silbury originally look like?</b> debate has been rumbling, on and off, over on the Stones List for some time (see under <b>What's it all about, Silbury? A prospect of Silbury Hill</b> and <b>Silbury Sketches</b>) culminating in an artist's impression with an accompanying article (both by PeterH) on the Portal at http://www.megalithic.co.uk/article.php?sid=2146412322&mode=&order=0
My own feeling is that Silbury probably was conceived as a white structure but was white for only a few years (it just seems too much of an obvious temptation that, if you're going to build something as impressive as Silbury, you're going to want to maximize the visual effect that the white chalk would have created (I might be completely wrong about that though :-) <i>Left</i> as bare chalk, however, Silbury would have started to erode pretty quickly and it was a brilliant solution to cover it with a self-renewing thatch - a covering that's protected it from everything nature's throw at it for over 4000 years.
As I said on the Stones List, and as Nigel has emphasized again above, we have to keep in mind that bold and innovative structures (and Silbury was both) like the Millennium Bridge and Kansai International Airport look good on paper but when they begin to wobble and sink we have to make the necessary 'corrections'.
The builders of Silbury weren't going to let all their hard work get washed back down into the fields so they made, perhaps, the only correction that was available to them - a living, self-renewing thatch.
Or... the builders might have just buggered off somewhere to start on some new project - a new stone kitchen for example or an early version of the London Gherkin ;-)
