On Silbury Hill by Adam Thorpe

I’ve just finished reading the poet and novelist Adam Thorpe’s book On Silbury Hill. His language, and the way he weaves the cloth of this book, is simply spell-binding. You could say the work is part exploration of the sacred landscape of Wiltshire, part personal memoir, part musings and meditations on the peculiar place we as a society find ourselves in today, but that does little justice to this inspired contribution to literature designed to uplift and feed the human soul. No wonder it was featured as a BBC ‘Book of the Week’ last summer. Adam Thorpe starts and finishes, and keeps coming back, to the subject of his book’s title – Silbury Hill – revealing ever deeper and broadening resonances and connections – doing what William Blake urged us to do: ‘To see eternity in a grain of sand’. He shows how the contemplation of a pile of earth in the Wiltshire fields can lead to any time, and any place.

Here’s just a short excerpt. After meeting some Pagans celebrating Samhain at West Kennet Long Barrow: “That night in bed, mind racing from my few hours in the parallel country of pagan enchantment that has never really gone away – like a guardian of the island’s damaged fabric – I picture Silbury’s great chalk-white hulk as it was back then, as sometimes we can glimpse it now when the grass is covered by snow.” Read more about it here.