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Silbury Hill

Silbury's spiral path

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Rune R
Rune Nov 3, 2005 00:41:10
Replying to Littlestone

>>I've thought for some time that the summit of Silbury was designed to be flat and, if so, it would suggest that it was used for something.<<

If Paul Devereux is right and the top was to view the Glory ( possibly among a lot of other things), then yes, a path would make a lot of sense, spiral for ease of use, any particular reason why the path would be clockwise and not anticlockwise going up?

I'll look at the model when I've figured out how to, the message "This control contains an eDrawing2 file. The eDrawing ActiveX control cannot be used from a Netscape browser. Please use Microsoft Internet Explorer to view this model." really doesn't help as I'm using IE ....

Rune

L Littlestone
Littlestone Nov 3, 2005 11:57:05
Replying to Rune

>any particular reason why the path would be clockwise and not anticlockwise going up?<

I've based the hypothesis of a (clockwise) path on early illustrations (Stukeley* being the most important of course), and photos of the top of Silbury - some to be found at http://www.themodernantiquarian.com/site/30#images which seem to indicate that if a path existed at all that's the way it went.

>I'll look at the model when I've figured out how to, the message "This control contains an eDrawing2 file. The eDrawing ActiveX control cannot be used from a Netscape browser. Please use Microsoft Internet Explorer to view this model." really doesn't help as I'm using IE ....<

I'm afraid I can't help you much there Rune (perhaps Ishmael or someone else can); it took me a while to get it going but it's worth it.

* See also Stukeley's illustration of the Marlborough Mount in his <i>Itinerarium Curiosum</i> (the path he shows here has probably been re-cut but it may have followed an original).