I love Silbury Hill. During the investigations of the 1960’s, when it was probed with massive corkscrews and pipes, to no avail, that strange cone was often featured on childrens’ telly programmes like Blue Peter and Newsround. It’s unlike anything else in Britain, and it’s accessible. You can drive up, find a gap in the fence (there’s always at least one), and clamber up to the top…if it’s dry enough that you won’t slip.

But why was it built? On who’s orders?

We assume that Neolithic people didn’t travel much but of course they did… people always travel…and there’s plenty of evidence for international trade too.

So, one day this hairy travelling bloke… or hairy travelling woman…. arrives at a prehistoric Devizes pub in a Ford Transit, loaded with exotic spices, cuddly toys …and unguents… and gets talking to the local warlord who’s been fretting about his future long barrow burial mound thingy …and how, style-wise, the design is a bit two-thousand-and-late BCE.

The well-travelled hairy nomad scratches a 2-dimensional triangle on a bit of bone and says, “This is how real kings and queens do it out East, and it’ll be a lot better tnan your poxy old barrow. Pay me 5,000 bilberries and I’ll sell you this design…in fact for 10,000 bilberries and a lardy cake you can have the copyright!”

This local warlord is well happy… pays up, gets all the local unemployed lads and lasses to build a big pile of mud and chalk. It’s basically a very large pile of stuff that naturally settles into a cone shape.

No one in the town had ever seen a real modern pyramid, so everyone in Wiltshire felt very smug… as people who live in Wiltshire generally do.

The old warlord died and the tribe realised there was no doorway to shove him in… and no burial chamber either. After a few jugs of mead they stuffed him into the nearest overflowing long barrow and kept shtum. Well style isn’t everything and he’d been a pretty shit warlord.

Wiltshire folk have been a bit smug ever since.

Ok so it’s a pretty dumb theory but as good as some other stuff on the fake archaeology sites.

Next up in Archeological Bollocks…the Bronze age origins of the Cornish pasty or pastilla and its role in facilitating the Phoenician tin trade.

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