They lunched in Marlborough and went on in the
afternoon to Silbury Hill, that British pyramid, the largest artificial
mound in Europe. They left the car by the roadside and clambered to the
top and were very learned and inconclusive about the exact purpose of
this vast heap of chalk and earth, this heap that men had made before
the temples at Karnak were built or Babylon had a name.
Then they returned to the car and ran round by a winding road into the
wonder of Avebury. They found a clean little inn there kept by pleasant
people, and they garaged the car in the cowshed and took two rooms for
the night that they might the better get the atmosphere of the ancient
place. Wonderful indeed it is, a vast circumvallation that was already
two thousand years old before the dawn of British history; a great wall
of earth with its ditch most strangely on its inner and not on its outer
side; and within this enclosure gigantic survivors of the great circles
of unhewn stone that, even as late as Tudor days, were almost complete.
A whole village, a church, a pretty manor house have been built, for the
most part, out of the ancient megaliths; the great wall is sufficient to
embrace them all with their gardens and paddocks; four cross-roads meet
at the village centre.
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