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Avebury & the Marlborough Downs

Weedon Hill

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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

I think I'm losing the will to live here...

I thought Stukeley was referring to 'Silbaby' and 'Silbaby' alone as Weedon Hill (see link to http://www.avebury-web.co.uk/silbaby.html ) in which case, and based on the fact that elsewhere in the country Weedon means 'Hill with a Welsh (British) Temple', it might indicate that 'Silbaby' was seen by the Anglo-Saxons as a (religious) 'structure' distinct from both Silbury Hill and Waden Hill.

That being the case it would reinforce Pete's discovery of a Silbury-type structure which he likes to call 'Silbaby' but which moss rightly says can't go through history with such a name (nor should it if Weedon proves to be the oldest know name ascribed to it and one which so accurately describes it as a Hill with a British Temple)!