The manmade hill in Witshire has puzzled academics for many years...
..but the significance of this hill is not what is is , but where it is..

Why Silbury..??

Imagine you are living in the times when you are changing from hunter/gatherers to resident farmers...your tribe occupying the same location all year around and with neighbouring tribes doing similar things.......

There is no way to exchange information other than word of mouth with no telephones or radio, important people may have used messengers or couriers , but every other place was at least a days journey away .....?????????....

In order to get the best yield from your seeds it would have been good to know the passage of the seasons , and so knowledge of calenders was important..........

After living in the same place for a while you would have noticed that the position of sunrise and sunset changed throughout the seasons ...which repeated in a cycle . That which we now call a YEAR......and so careful observation was needed to allow the prediction of the changing seasons.

Tracking the Sun

This knowledge of observing the rising and setting sun could have been handed down from father to son or from aging priest to neophyte in order to keep the practice alive .
Imagine then visiting neighbouring tribes and becoming aware of their methods of doing the same observations.........while the IDEA of watching the sunrise and sunset may have become widespread , the actual METHOD and location used for the observation must have varied depending on the local geography .

Newbury-Basingstoke Area

Any tribes living in the area to the south of what is now Newbury have a natural ridge or escarpment running East/West which includes Sidown Hill , Beacon Hill , Ladle Hill , Watership Down , White Hill , Cottingtons Hill and Plantation Hill .
Looking North from the ridge there are several convenient high points and isolated hills which can provide a useful reference in the valley below.......

Just from casual observation a few days apart , and seeing which side the sun sets from a particular tree on your horizon can tell you if it is approaching mid-summer , or if it has passed......

The mid-summer Solstice being regarded as the NEED-TO-KNOW in this day and age , daily observations can track the motion and fortell that the Solstice is approaching.......but in the week before and after the actual event , the apparent change in the position of the sunrise or sunset is very small , and a high degree of precision is required to plot the exact day of the Solstice .

Stone circles such as Stonehenge and Avebury are too small to achieve this degree of accuracy unless matched with a distant reference point , and they must always have been purely ceremonial locations .

Any error in deciding the day would have had repercussions in the following years and led to indecision about the actual length of the year.....

Once Midsummer had been defined and agreed apon by everyone , midwinter could have been predicted simply by counting the days , and from then the year split up into shorter parts .......

So if you were living in between what is now Newbury and Basingstoke ........you had the opportunity to observe the sunrise
from somewhere on the escarpment in beween White Hill and Cottingtons Hill and use the high point just to the east of Kingsclere to check the position of the sunrise close to mid-summer .

If there were a marker of some form , a stone column or large tree on the hilltop at Kingsclere it would be a more accurate observation.........you could move up or down the hillside to put the horizon level with your marker point , and move East or West along the hillside to put the sun exactly behind the marker say.........when half the disc was visible .

Marking your own position with a stone or a stick in the ground ... and making the same observation on successive days would show which way the sunrise was moving ....

By keeping track in this manner any small changes are magnified because your reference point is a couple of kilometers away.

Similarly in the evening , the setting sun could be checked against a marker point on Isle Hill to the West of Kingsclere ..

If you lived further to the West , you could make similar observations of sunrise from Upper Woodcott Down using Beacon Hill as a reference point , crossing the valley to Great Lichfield Down to make a reading of the same Beacon Hill at sunset ....

Every community or tribe may have had a person entrusted with the observation of such points to keep track of the date by using convenient hill tops which provided the needed alignment ......

Living in Other Places

One can imagine that there are many similar places which offer alignments in order to track the sun , the requirements being for an observer at 52 degrees north of the equator............

.....a convenient high reference point on a bearing of 48.5 degrees for mid-summer sunrise.........

and /or a reference point on a bearing of 311.5 degrees from the observer for a midsummer sunset .....

So what happens if there is no obvious place which you can use as a distant reference point , do you rely on getting a messenger from another tribe , who have the needed information , travelling over to tell you..???????..

...perhaps you were supposed to all meet up for a big feast at mid-summer and had a four day journey..??????..so you would need advance warning !!!!! even if you visited another community and were told how many days it was to go to mid-summer , you have to keep track and count the days as you journey home , then go about your normal business ......and not lose track of the days .

Lambourn-Uffington

Any resident of the Lambourn Downs visiting the Beacon Hill area would immediately be struck by the similarity in the local geography.....

....the North facing escarpment of the Lambourn Downs has a lot in common with the terrain of the Watership Down area , but is lacking any convenient hills in the valley to the North of the escarpment which might offer the chance to check alignments ....

...and so we come to DRAGON HILL . Just below where the Uffington White Horse is now , there is a part of the hillside projecting North into the valley , a promontory whose original shape remains a matter of guesswork .



A close look at Dragon Hill from the road....

Someone must have thought , if it were possible to increase the height it would make an ideal reference point across which to take observations of the sun throughout the summer , just choose the point on the hillside from which you want to watch.........

This is looking at Dragon Hill from a point on the downs looking towards the rising sun at mid-summer.......

From studying photographs and aerial observation , what we now see as DRAGON HILL does not look at all natural .......!!!

...if loose soil were heaped on the highest point repeatedly it would naturally slide down and produce a conical mound which would be a useful marker , in later years other societies may have levelled off the top surface , leaving some untidy spoil around the shape we see today ......but if it was originally formed as a conical mound it was most useful as a reference point as described .

The higher it was.. then the higher the observer could climb up the side of the escarpment in order to align the top with the horizon , and the better view was provided of the horizon also . It was probably about 13 metres higher at one time , this would bring it to a gentle point at the top .

On the hillside where the observation would take place , there is a 'step' where the very steep slope levels off to a much more gentle slope for some 4 or 5 metres , then continues up at a steeper but manageable slope on up to the top of the hill...

..On satellite photos this appears to be part of a pathway from the bottom to the top of the hill....


SILBURY

So we come to SILBURY...............Now if one examines the geography around Silbury Hill , obvious similarities become apparent when compared to Uffington and Dragon Hill .

It may never be known which was built and used first , and which was the copy , but it would certainly be possible to use either location to take observations of the mid-summer sunrises and sunsets and in the case of Silbury some less accurate observations can be made of the mid-winter sunrises and sunsets also....

.. this is due to the arrangement of hills . The gentle slopes away to the north allow an observation point across the top of Silbury to see the mid-winter sun emerging from the nearby hills . As the 'horizon' is fairly close the accuracy becomes diminished.....