Revealed: What IS the secret of Silbury Hill?
By MICHAEL HANLON
Last updated at 01:06am on 3rd November 2007
Pagan burial site? Too boring. UFO landing pad? Too bonkers. So what IS the secret of Silbury Hill? Terry the Druid reveals all
Can there be anything more po-faced than a health and safety briefing?
We are about to enter some rather iffy tunnels dug into Silbury Hill, in Wiltshire, a 4,400-year-old man-made pyramid constructed entirely from chalk.
It will be wet, dark and nasty in there, so we need to take precautions. There is talk of wearing hard hats, stout footwear and highvisibility jackets.
But what makes our briefing slightly less catatonic than the average health and safety lecture is the presence of Terry Dobney.
He looks, well, different from the other officials.
For a start, he is wearing a long white robe.
And he sports facial hair of Biblical proportions.
He is carrying a piece of antler, and a long wooden staff with a crystal in the top.
Terry, you see, is an official site druid. But that doesn't mean he doesn't have to wear a hard hat like everyone else.
All the spirits of heaven and earth won't save him if one of those tunnels collapses on his head.
It seems appropriate that our expedition should be accompanied by one of the more bizarre manifestations of officialdom, because we are at one of the most extraordinary and impressive ancient monuments in Britain, if not the world.
The hill is actually a truncated grasscovered pyramid about 120ft high and more than 600ft across, weighing an estimated half a million tonnes.
Silbury, just south of Avebury, took more than 100 years to build and work began, according to the radiometric dating that has been carried out on bits of vegetation and other material recovered from its innards, about 4,400 years ago.
Over the centuries, various lunatics have riddled the ancient chalk construction with tunnels, mostly in an attempt to find treasure.
The latest was in 1968 and was at, quite extraordinarily, the behest of the BBC.
They hacked into this unique national treasure with impunity to make a series of gimmicky history programmes.
They even built a recording studio in there.
When Silbury started caving in on itself a few years ago, a plan was hatched to repair the damage by pouring in hundreds of tons of chalk paste to fill the voids.
By the start of next year Silbury should be safe, its voids filled, making now about the last time anyone will be able to venture down the tunnels.
We enter the hill through a portal - constructed for the BBC team 39 years ago.
Inside it is dank, dark, wet underfoot and, frankly, rather horrible. Overhead, keeping up the thousands of tons of loosely-compacted chalk, are steel arches and some badly rusted pit props.
Above, on a couple of occasions, we see chutes leading up into the gloom, the remains of the exploratory shafts dug in the 18th and 19th centuries.
On the walls are numbers on pieces of paper, which mark the places where significant strata have been identified.
According to chief archaeologist Jim Leary, the construction technique was "very impressive", with carefully packed chalk rubble shored up by stone facing.
I am shown a layer of clay.
"This was the orginal surface, the ground," says Jim.
An indentation shows where - perhaps - the heel of a human foot struck the ground more than 4,000 years ago.
I try to imagine what this sliver of Wiltshire was like back then.
The same rocks, the same hills, but subtly different; more trees, possibly. Warmer, definitely, maybe two degrees more so than today; and in the woods, wolves and bears, the indigenous large carnivores of southern Britain.
Humans were not necessarily the top of the food chain back then.
This really is a trip into the bowels of England's past.
Back outside, after a steep, wheezy climb to the top, one can see the various other wonders of Neolithic Wiltshire: the stone circle at Avebury, together with a long avenue of standing stones; the nearby West Kennet Long Barrow and, 16 miles over the horizon to the south, Stonehenge.
It is a magical place.
The questions are, of course, who built all this stuff and why?
The first question is more easily answered than the latter.
Modern genetic analysis reveals that after the ice-age glaciers receded from Britain about 8-10,000 years ago, these islands were repopulated by probably two waves of peoples - one from what is now Spain and Portugal, the other from the north and east, from what is now Denmark and Norway.
And it is from these peoples, who built Silbury and Stonehenge, that most British people today are descended.
But as to why our ancestors built these huge monuments, we can only guess. Stonehenge was certainly some sort of astronomical instrument - and the various standing stones not only of Wiltshire but further west in Cornwall and to the far south in Brittany, France, may similarly have served some sort of astronomical purpose.
But Silbury?
The official line from Jim Leary and his colleagues is that it must have been inspired by "ritual".
The trouble is, this is pretty much what archaeologists always say when faced with an object they don't understand: it must have something to do with religion.
"This is a big ceremonial mound," Leary insists. "It's not a big clock, it wasn't built for a bit of a laugh, or to give people something to do."
He points to the fact that there is none of the usual random detritus and debris associated with ancient secular building projects - no discarded meat bones, no ash from fires, bits of pottery and so on.
"This suggests that the site was always treated with some reverence."
In addition, large, solid "sarsen" stones (boulders similar to those at Stonehenge) have been found embedded in the chalk; one theory is that these represent the souls of the dead.
Maybe the whole thing is a sort of "virtual mausoleum".
That's the current theory.
But there have been a whole host of rather more outlandish ideas concerning Silbury over the years.
A long-standing legend holds that the hill is the tomb of King Sil, a statue of whom (in gold) supposedly lurks in a secret chamber to this day.
This mistaken belief that, like the Pyramids, Silbury Hill is full of treasure led to a series of attempts to dig into the mound, beginning when a team of Cornish miners were recruited by the Duke of Northumberland in 1776 to dig vertically into the hill from its summit.
In the 19th century, more tunnels were dug in the quest to find a hidden chamber.
Then in 1968 a huge series of corridors and chambers were excavated as part of that BBC project, in what can only be described as an act of archaeological vandalism.
No treasure was ever found, but that did not stop the speculation.
In fact, a delightfully bonkers belief system has arisen in recent decades which attempts to link ancient sites like Silbury and the Pyramids in Egypt with alien visitations, and even structures on the surface of Mars.
More UFOs are "seen" round here than anywhere else in Europe.
Stir into this brew crop circles (also often found conveniently nearby), ley-lines and the whole paraphernalia of the New Age and it is clear why the Avebury region is the mecca of the spooky brigade.
And indeed the Druids. Druidism is the catch-all term for the pre-Christian belief systems of western Europe, including the British Isles.
With the advent of Christianity, the Druids more or less died out, but in the 18th and 19th centuries, during the Romantic period, there was something of a revival of interest in the ancient beliefs.
Today, paganism has never been more popular.
Hence Terry Dobney's presence on the site.
He is here in his official capacity as Keeper of the Stones and, indeed,
Archdruid of Avebury.
He has official status as on- site religious adviser, and yet I cannot help notice the somewhat sarcastic asides from the professional-team working on the site as they mutter about "Terry's theories".
When I asked him about his beliefs, I was expecting the usual stream of New Age gibberish; what I got surprised me.
Terry the Druid does not believe in God, nor even in the gods.
"There is a lot of debate in the pagan community," he says. "Some of them work with gods and goddesses.
"I take a Dawkins view of the world."
What, Richard Dawkins, evolutionary biologist, arch-atheist and scourge of believers of all shades? Surely not.
"Yes, him. I agree with him totally; evolution and all that."
So you don't worship gods and spirits and things?
"If I worship anything, I worship the Earth," Terry says firmly.
That and ancient motorcycles, which he has a good business restoring.
What about virgin sacrifices, I ask.
Surely you have those?
"Nope, can't find any virgins."
SO what's Silbury all about then?
Again, surprisingly, Terry takes a practical view.
"It's a barometer," he says, claiming that the whole mound is some sort of primitive device to measure slight changes in air pressure, which in turn affect the ground water levels in the compacted chalk.
That and the fact that the River Kennet rises just 200 yards away suggests, say the Druids, that the mound could have also been part of a water-goddess cult.
To be honest it sounds no sillier than the official view - which dismisses Terry's idea as "nuts".
The truth is, we still have no idea what Silbury was for.
Terry the Druid may be just as right as the scientists, and English Heritage plead with me to keep him out of my report for some reason. 
Barring a massive earthquake or a meteor strike, Silbury will probably be here for another 4,000 years and who knows what archaeologists then will make of the strange tunnels that were dug and then, only a few decades later, filled in.
No doubt they will come up with as many theories to explain our actions as we do to explain what went on more than four millennia ago.
And no doubt they will bear just as little relation to the truth
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