Sealing up Silbury Hill

Stone-age man built Silbury Hill with his bare hands and it has dominated this landscape and people's imaginations ever since. In the last few centuries they started to unearth the history and meaning of the mound, but their curiosity was clumsy: in the year 2000 Silbury Hill started to collapse.

We were taken down a re-opened tunnel into the heart of the hill by archaeologists in the 1960s. It was supposed to be permanently filled afterwards. But when engineers went back in they found that the tunnelling was the cause of the hill's collapse.

There is an urgency to the repairs taking place. During our short visit, another large chunk Silbury hill gave in to gravity, spilling into the tunnel.

The last 300 years have seen repeated attempts to learn more about the hill. Rumours of buried gold led the duke of Northumberland in 1776 to sink a shaft to its base.

70 years later, antiquarian John Merriweather dug a tunnel from the side of the hill to the centre. Richard Atkinson dug another in 1969, that wasn't filled in. Over time they caused the hill to start to collapse.

The work to save the hill has opened up old tunnels to a new generation of archaeologists. Every layer of chalk, giving clues to Silbury's construction with antler pick-axes and flints. And their new finds can be examined with new techniques.

These ancient fragments of grass, moss, seeds, even stone-age beetles can tell researchers what the climate was like when the Hill was built. Was it forest or grassland?

The hill's imposing position in the landscape has drawn people through more than just curiosity. Jim Leary explains how new surveys revealed a large roman village once stood in the field opposite hill. Timbers, arrow heads and pottery found on the summit this summer suggest a violent past too.

All this new knowledge will probably never reveal exactly who built the mound and why. The main theory is that nearby springs that feed a tributary of the once sacred River Thames, make this a spiritual place. To some, it still is.

In a fortnight the archaeologists must pack up, so the engineers can begin properly filling all the old tunnels and boreholes. The plan, to seal them in perpetuity. But if the history of Silbury tells us one thing its that our descendents would well be tempted back.

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