Yesterday we went on a bit of an adventure to some amazingly old and awesome neolithic sites. The first was Silbury hill, which is a hill in Silbury. Unlike most hills, this one is man made. It apparently took 18 million man hours, which is... I don't know... ages. It looks like this from a distance:
The roof had been reinforced in some rooms to help with collapsing, and they had put in some glass bricks to let some light in, this is me in one of those rooms.
And this from close up.
You can actually only really see the top half of it here, so it's hard to get the scale, but it's about 40 meters high - about the same as some of the newer pyramids in Egypt. The only thing higher than this in the area was the weird lady on the side of the highway trying to sketch the hill in her notepad. Pretty sure everyone knows what a hill looks like lady. Anyway, it would have been great to climb, but you're not allowed. Something about it being the biggest and oldest neolithic site in Europe.
Getting to the hill was easy, it was right next to the carpark. The West Kennet Long Barrow was a different story however. This would have been great to show on one of those old slide projectors, so just imagine yourself in a room with me clicking through this while you sip on a brandy or something.
The West Kennet Long Barrow is crazy old, these guys were into stone tombs before they were cool (in your face Egypt). It was made about 6000 years ago, and the National Heritage Trust were kind enough to put a gate on the side of the highway leading into a paddock/swamp a few kms away, as a kind of marker to help us find it. Beyond the gate I relied not on the map that we had, but on my instincts. Turns out I'm great at finding sludge.
This was my favorite bit of sludge.
With this a close second:
At one point I thought I was onto a shortcut, but it turned out to be a mire (I think that's the term for waist deep grass and almost knee deep mud?).
 |
| Nope |
We crossed a few streams, this one was probably the best looking of them all (there was a duck with a team of ducklings in another stream, but they were really fast so I couldn't get a picture of them).
Some of the walking was just regular old paddock walking.
And some of it was like a tunnel of old trees and moss (and sludge).
And then we saw it (at the top of a hill, and we were like 'maybe that's it?').
So we walked up there. Up to this point we hadn't seen anyone else.
And this was it.
After seeing some stuff in London where it was all masses of people, tour guides, tickets booths and 2 hour long lines, it was pretty weird to get to this place and not see a single person. It was really cool on one hand, and really unsettling on the other. Was there a reason there were no people for miles around? Maybe Thursdays is zombie day? Or maybe it was just the non stop rain. So we went into the 6000 year old underground tomb. This is me saying 'No. Fucking. Way.' as I gazed into the entrance.
The roof had been reinforced in some rooms to help with collapsing, and they had put in some glass bricks to let some light in, this is me in one of those rooms.
It was pretty amazing being in this place, even more so because we were alone. It was like a set from Indiana Jones, except that if it was an old movie set there probably would have been more people. There were 5 largish rooms that would have been filled with the bodies of the dead, only one room and the passage between rooms had light. It was completely silent, except for the water dripping from the rocks that formed the ceiling, and very musty. We hung around for a bit then headed on to other sites (which I might write about later).
All in all a good day, except that towards the end of it my waterproof pockets both filled with water and became unusable, so I just had to walk around awkwardly with my arms dangling by my side. I hate doing that.
