Silbury Hill
Avebury, Wiltshire, United Kingdom
Europe's largest prehistoric man-made mound, built around 2400 BCE beside the Kennet with no tomb inside it, its purpose unknown, its grass slopes off-limits and best read from the road below.
Silbury Hill is a chalk-and-earth mound as tall as a seven-storey building, raised in stages around 2400-2300 BCE at the bottom of the Kennet valley between Avebury and the long barrow. It contains no burial: the careful tunnelling of the nineteen-sixties and the conservation work of the 2000s found successive construction phases and empty chambers, which leaves its purpose open, and the honest position is that archaeology has ruled out what it is not without establishing what it was. Whatever the intent, the engineering effort has no obvious parallel in Neolithic Europe.
You cannot climb it, and that is the visit's modesty: after a shaft collapse in 2000 and decades of erosion from informal paths, the mound itself is closed and visitors are directed to the layby and the paths around its base, from which the profile is best read. It stays in the same landscape it was built for, visible in line with Avebury's avenues, and on a clear day the mound, the henge, and the long barrow line up as one Neolithic composition.
Visiting
English Heritage's Silbury Hill page carries the access: free, reasonable daylight hours, viewing only; the National Trust's around-the-hill walk is the better way to see it.
Photo: [Wikimedia Commons](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:SilburyHill_gobeirne.jpg), CC BY-SA 3.0.
Associated traditions & practices
Visitor stories