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Synopsis
Silbury Hill in Wiltshire has inspired and perplexed people for generations. Artists and poets have fathomed their deepest thoughts searching for the hill's hidden meanings, archaeologists have tunnelled through earth for fragments that prove its purpose. But for all this human endeavour, Silbury Hill remains a mystery. We do know it is the largest prehistoric mound in Europe. But was it once an island, moated by water? Was it a place of worship and celebration, perhaps a vast measure of the passing seasons? Along with Stonehenge and Avebury, was it part of a healing landscape or a physical memory of the long-ago dead? Silbury Hill is the sum of all that we project. A blank screen where human dreams and nightmares flicker. The hill has been part of Adam Thorpe's own life since his schooldays at Marlborough, which he would often escape in the surrounding downlands. He has carried Silbury ever since, through his teenage years in Cameroon, into his adulthood in southern England and France: its presence fused to each landscape which became his home. On Silbury Hill is Adam Thorpe's own projection onto Silbury's grassy slopes.
It is a chalkland memoir told in fragments and family snapshots, skillfully built, layer on layer, from Britain's ancient and modern past. New & Used
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What Reviewers Are Saying
"There is no contemporary I admire more than Adam Thorpe - His new book On Silbury Hill is an experiment in pyscho-geography, partly a memoir, partly an exploration of the strange prehistoric landscape of Wiltshire - A book that is not only fascinating to read but a pleasure to hold in the hand." (HILARY MANTEL, Vogue) ----- "You should burrow in and discover this for yourself, but what makes On Silbury Hill such a rich and evocative book of place are the myriad two-way hauntings he proposes between people and landscapes over time." (PAUL FARLEY, Guardian) ----- "It seems to me to be everything that a book ought to be or should want to be: beautiful, suggestive, personal, knowing and uncertain, old but of now, funny and modest and ripe in its lived-in ways." (TIM DEE, author of The Running Sky and Four Fields) ----- "In a fascinating series of interwoven strands, this book blends history, myth, archaeology, topography and poetry, and always leads us back to the haunting beauty of the question: 'Why?' " (BEL MOONEY, Daily Mail) ----- "On Silbury Hill [is] a remarkable and moving mix of history, autobiography and genius loci - packed with erudition, enthusiasm and rapt personal engagement." (WILLIAM BOYD, New Statesman Books of the Year) ----- "His writing spills out hot and fierce as summer wind, scouring the chalky, ancient Ridgeway and buffering up against the confounding slopes of Silbury Hill itself, concluding that 'ingenuity and accident and maybe a dose of genius' played their part in its creation. The same could be said of this excellent book." (VICKY CAROL, Big Issue) ----- " - impressive elegance and concision - evocative and moving - a lament for something modern man has largely lost - a deeply personal and idiosyncratic memoir." (ANTHONY HEAD, Times Literary Supplement) ----- "All impressive detective-work and field research aside, On Silbury Hill is a fine stand-alone memoir. But it's more than that. It is a love letter, a homage to an object, a place and a symbol that has provided succour and mystery and hope and wonder." (BEN MYERS, Caught by the River) ----- "A deeply personal book written in precise and beautiful prose." (JOHN OWEN, Country & Town House) "He seeks a blend of the personal and the scientific - that raises profound questions about what archaeology can understand of the past. With the book's attractive feel, and clear and often memorable writing, 'interpretive archaeology' never came so seductively packaged." (MIKE PITTS, British Archaeology) ----- "Honest enough to admit that we cannot hope to do more than conjecture - and yet sympathetic to successive archaeological, psychological, poetic and spiritual interpretations, Thorpe proves an engaging guide to a landscape steeped in secrets." (GREG NEALE, Resurgence & Ecologist) ----- "What I particularly love about the whole book - is the openness of this dry, wry, sometimes angry, often self-deprecating historian to - the intrusion of memory and magic." (RUTH DAVIS, Nature and the common good) ----- "Some books slipped quietly onto the shelves this year, none more so than Adam Thorpe's On Silbury Hill (Little Toller Books, GBP15), a wonderfully idiosyncratic but deeply informed personal essay on what might well be the most mysterious of England's landmarks." (JOHN BURNSIDE, The Herald) **** Book of the Week on BBC Radio 4 (August 2014) ***** Longlisted for the Wainwright Prize 2015 ****