Guardian UK: says; 'Severe weather is washing away thousands of years of heritage in the UK. Maev Kennedy surveys the damage to Silbury Hill and Rotherwas Ribbon.'Rain falling remorselessly on Silbury Hill on Thursday 26th July 2007, pooled on the sodden fields at its foot, and dangerously seeped down into the core of the most enigmatic prehistoric monument in Europe. The entire hill near Avebury in Wiltshire is artificial, built around 4,500 years ago by stupendous human effort with an estimated 35m baskets of chalk. Yesterday, archaeologists and engineers were engaged in urgent discussions on how to save Silbury, after the torrential rain caused further damage to a structure already weakened by earlier floods.
The engineering contractors Skanska, who were carrying out structural repairs for English Heritage, pulled its miners off the hill on Monday, fearing that the 40-year-old tunnel in which they were working might collapse. A few days ago their temporary access track was under a metre of water.
Silbury's purpose - observatory, ritual platform or simply awe-inspiring demonstration of power and wealth - is still guesswork. No original chamber or passage has ever been detected. The site is wreathed in folklore of treasure hoards, which have attracted centuries of treasure-hunters.
In floods five years ago, a chasm opened at the top of the hill, where a poorly filled 200-year-old shaft collapsed, and water poured down into the structure, seeping into voids left by generations of later diggers, including the tunnels from a major excavation in the 1960s. The plan, now left in chaos by the weather, was to empty those tunnels completely of their previous loose fill, and then pack them solidly again with chalk. Instead rain is still seeping into the mound, from the summit where the earlier domed repair has already partly washed away, causing damage which can't even be fully assessed until the rain stops.
Silbury is not alone. As well as the human tragedies, the floods have been washing away thousands of years of history, across a swath of central and southern England. Silbury has been unmissable for millennia, but in Hereford, rain has been scouring away parts of a mysterious structure uncovered only a few weeks ago: the Rotherwas Ribbon, a serpentine path surfaced with deliberately burned stones, winding up a shallow hill - slap in the path of an unpopular new road plan.
