Postcards to friends of the Stonehenge and Avebury World
Heritage Site Every year hundreds of people climb Silbury Hill,
ignoring signs explaining why they should not. Until recently,
all used an ancient spiral path that is conspicuously visible
from the roadside, but after Silbury’s 2008 restoration at least
half a dozen new routes appeared, each producing an ugly,
vertical scar. Most climbers preferred the same ‘discrete’ route
least visible from the road; after only a few years their
collective boots formed steps, as they cut through the turf into
bare soil. In this record year of rainfall that soil has eroded
away, leaving a foot-deep scar. Those that climb assume that one
individual cannot make any difference to a monument so vast –
but there are people on the hill virtually every day of the
year. Hundreds of individuals do make a difference, as this
picture clearly shows: crossing the meadow then up the side of
the monument, the climbers are eroding irreplaceable archaeology
that has stood for thousands