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Avebury & the Marlborough Downs

Weedon Hill

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Stukeley refers to the Great Bank as Weedon-hill. Apologies if this has been mentioned before but -

"Weedon. 'hill with a heathen temple'. OE weoh+dun..."* may be relevant.

* Oxford Dictionary of English Place-Names by A D Mills. ISBN 0 19 280074 4. Page 368.

that sounds suspiciously like Waden Hill to me?
http://www.themodernantiquarian.com/site/4757

Morning all.

Waden is Weedon is Woden: its the girt ridge alongside the Kennet Avenue. In those days even Stukeley didn't always spell things the same way twice.

Silbury is Seall, is Sil is Zil, is Selkley as in the Hundred of Selkley.

Wymans Hill is a corruption of Windmill Hill.

Abury, is Aubrey, is Avebury. John did say he wasn't naming it after himself

Waleditch is the ditch and bank of the henge.

Tidworth is actually Tedworth but a military cartographer made a spelling mistake.

Lastly 'weedon', is the name of the man who taught the world to play the guitar.

VBB

If the question is whether is Silbury or Silbaby has been historically called Waden Hill or confused with it I think the answer is no.

Having said that there is another interesting aspect which I may have mentioned before, that being the ground flanking Waden and the Ridgeway being Bay Down. There are two interesting aspects, the first being that the Battle of Mons Badonicus AD 500 was fought at Mount Badon (Mount Bay Down), the course of the battle has suggested to military scholars this was Liddington, but the plan they produced matches Silbury and Waden Hill. The fun bit is the legend of Silbury which I am sure you all know refers to a cobbler who meets the Devil carrying a sack of soil and threatening to dump it on Devizes or Marlborough (depending on who tells the story) and asks the cobbler the way - the cobbler empties his sack of shoes and says you don't want to walk all that way when I wore all these shoes out walking from there - hence the Devil dumping his sack of soil at the side of the road and that became Silbury Hill. What is interesting is that this story deploys a cobbler and a big bag of shoes - what was it they collected from the dead at the end of battles apart from arms and armour ?

The other thing of interest is the use of the term Wa-lditch for the ditch and bank, it emerged from the middle ages that this was not the name of the henge but the road - viewed as a clock from 5 to the hour clockwise round to 20 to the hour the ditch and bank was held in common and used as a road (probably why the monks and shepherds buried stones instead of rolling them in the ditch). What may be relevant here is that the area of Avebury in the hands of the manor as controlled by French monks begins with 'Wa'. As the monks were the ones doing the writing this is perhaps significant.

Otherwise I could be talkin bollix (phonetic like) !

VBB

Thought I'd bump this as reading through it again there are some really excellent and hilarious contributions, and the thread might be of interest to folks who missed it first time around.