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Silbury Hill
20 Wiltshire Scenes (16)
Silbury Hill, like its world famous neighbors the Avebury Stone Circle and Stonehenge, leaves one in awe as to how it could have been built. It can't be accepted as a natural outcrop... it's symmetry is too perfect. And Erich von Daniken's theories about extra-terrestrial builders as described in "Chariots of the Gods" are thought by most to be too fanciful... although to others riveting and entertaining reading.
Whilst excavations dating as far back as 1776 and as recent as the summer of 2007 have partially succeeded in determining how Silbury Hill was constructed and approximately when, there are no clues as to why and only estimates of by how many pairs of hands.
That it is Early Bronze Age is beyond doubt... radiocarbon dating techniques having established, for example, that hazel twig fragments from the central core of the mound are 2,145 ±95 years B.C. However, other than pieces of deer antler, used for digging at the time, no other artifacts have been discovered to establish the reason for such a monumental work.
Various theories and calculations have been put forward as to how long a local or visiting population labored on Silbury Hill. The mound has a stepped interior, made from seven concentric circular walls of chalk, each divided into cells to stop the mound from flattening out under its own weight... clearly its builders had an understanding of soil mechanics. The blocks for this internal core were hewn from the chalky ground around the base so additionally forming an important and symbolic ditch surrounding the mound.
Surprisingly Silbury Hill is the largest man-made earthwork in Europe and so calculations abound as to the number of people who worked on it, the cubic measures of earth used, etc. Most are not difficult to work out... Silbury Hill is 40 meters high, 165 meters in diameter across the base (which covers an area of 21,000 square meters) and 30 meters across on the top. This gives its size as roughly a quarter of a million cubic meters of chalk and infilling... or 35,000,000 basket loads in Early Bronze Age terms... which in modern parlance equates to about 18,000,000 man-hours.
But that is only on the physical labor side of the job. If you think about how such a work force was fed, as well as how and where that food was grown under the harsh conditions that existed then... and what normal activities were temporarily abandoned in order to build it (temporary in this case being possibly one hundred years or so in time) then you have to begin to wonder at the motivation the builders must have had.
Perhaps Silbury Hill was built as a symbol of fertility... people do liken it to a pregnant woman with the surrounding water-filled ditch being the "water of life." Whatever the reason, on occasions the Victorians had other ideas... once playing a cricket match on the top. It must have been easy for batsmen to score highly with boundaries, but spare a thought for the poor fielders having to retrieve the ball from the bottom of the hill and return it in one huge throw before staggering back up again!
Photo notes
It is a difficult subject to photograph... a standard 50mm lens doesn't include it all unless you are a good distance away in the surrounding countryside because convenient viewing positions from the main road are limited... and from far away the perspective is too tame to make the hill look anything out of the ordinary. Get up close with a wide-angle lens from the official viewing point and the subject fills the frame... but using the same wide-angle lens from a short distance away may make the subject stand out from it's surroundings (if you get it right)... the visual isolation revealing the extraordinary presence of the man-made hill.
I used one of my favorite lenses from the past (I always, stupidly, get rid of favorite lenses... that is, I always sell lenses which I realize later have become favorites) namely the Canon FD 17mm f/4. The particular example I owned and used extensively for about five years had a loose mechanism. The cell containing the glass (11 pieces of it) waggled about slightly... but it didn't appear to affect performance because the images were always very sharp with no softness at the edges or in the corners. It's not possible to see any detail on the screen at 72dpi, but in the moat surrounding the hill are eight swans... less than 1 millimeter in length on the 250 millimeter wide print, their graceful shapes are clearly discernible with a magnifier. The fiber print was made on Agfa Multicontrast Classic, in Agfa Neutol WA warm-tone developer and split-toned in Selenium to enhance the difference between the heavily pregnant presence of the hill against the purity of the ice-covered flood plain.
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