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Serialised book readings, featuring works from various genres

Serialised book readings, featuring works of non-fiction, biography, autobiography, travel, diaries, essays, humour and history

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Adam Thorpe

Book of the Week: On Silbury Hill: Episode 1

On Silbury Hill

Episode 1

BBC Radio 4 - Book of the Week, On Silbury Hill, Episode 1

Adam Thorpe pays personal tribute to a mystery from Britain's ancient past.

4 Extra Debut. Adam Thorpe explores the base of this familiar Wiltshire turf, not exposed to sunlight for 4,300 years. Read by Philip Franks.

Silbury Hill in Wiltshire - together with Stonehenge, Avebury and the remains of numerous barrows - forms part of a Neolithic landscape about which very little is known or understood.

Adam Thorpe describes his book as '"a marble cake of different soils. Memoir, data, theory, streaks of poetry, swirls of fiction" - but he is not alone in having been drawn to explore the meaning of the largest prehistoric mound in Europe. Artists and archaeologists as well as various cults and neo-pagan traditions have focussed on the blank canvas that the hill presents as a way of exploring our complicated relationship with the past and the people who lived there.

"An estimated million hours spent on construction rather than herding or cooking or stitching must have had a point, but we don't get it. Is conjecture a species of fiction? To muddy the difference further, Silbury insisted on being called 'she'. I obeyed, not out of New Age winsomeness but from the influence of country dialect, in which neuter pronouns are as alien as robot leaf blowers."

This chalkland memoir told in fragments and snapshots, takes a circular route around the hill, a monument which we can no longer climb, and celebrates the urge to stand and wonder.

Episode 1:The base of Silbury Hill covers five acres of Wiltshire turf which have not seen sunlight for 4,300 years. Adam Thorpe has known her since he was 13 years old.


Abridged, directed and produced by Jill Waters.
A Waters Company production for BBC Radio 4.

Book of the Week: On Silbury Hill

BBC Radio 4

Intelligent speech, the most insightful journalism, the wittiest comedy, the most fascinating features and the most compelling drama and readings anywhere in UK radio.

Factual: Life Stories

Adam Thorpe explores the mystery of the 4,300-year-old man-made construction.

Adam Thorpe explores the mystery of the 4,300-year-old man-made construction, through his personal recollections of it. Abridged by Jill Waters.

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