Et viridi in campo templum de marmore ponam, &c.
So Herodotus describing the manner of sepulture among the Thracians and Macedonians. The whole matter is so notorious, that I leave the reader to make the particular application and parallel. Here at Silbury, the country being all a fine and exquisite down, I cannot point out the place where the games were kept: perhaps on the meadow between Abury and the hill.
I took notice that apium grows plentifully about the spring-head of the Kennet. Pliny writes defunctorum epulis dicatum apium. To this day the country people have a particular regard for the herbs growing there, and a high opinion of their virtue.
The king-barrows which are round, both here and elsewhere vary in their turn and shape, as well as magnitude, as we see in a group together; whereof still very many are left, many destroy’d by the plough. Some of the royal barrows are extremely old, being broad and flat, as if sunk into the ground with age. There is one near Longstone cove set round with stones. I have depicted two groups of them, one by the serpent’s head, on [Overton-hill]; another by the serpent’s tail, in the way between Bekamton and Oldbury camp: some flat, some campani-form, some ditch’d about, some not. One near the temple on Overton-hill was quite levell’d for ploughing anno 1720; a man’s bones were found within a bed of great stones, forming a kind of arch. Several beads of amber long and round, as big as one’s thumb end, were taken from it, and several enamel’d British beads of glass: I got some of them, white in colour, some were green. They commonly reported the bones to be larger than common. So Virgil Georg. 1.
Grandiaque effossis mirabitur ossa sepulchris.
I bought a couple of British beads, one large of a light blue and rib’d, the other less, of a dark blue, taken up in one of the two barrows on Hakpen-hill, east of Kennet avenue. These two barrows are ditch’d about, and near one another. The single barrow next it toward the snake’s head temple, is large and beautifully turn’d, with a ditch about it, at a distance, which throws it into a campanule form.
TAB. XXIII.
P. 44.
A Prospect from Abury Steeple.
Stukeley d.