Silbury Hill is the largest prehistoric man-made mound in Europe. It was built over 4,000 years ago in the Neolithic period. Today part of the Avebury World Heritage Site, the monument’s purpose and significance for prehistoric people remains unknown. The Guardian has reported that the work to prevent this ancient monument from collapsing has been completed. On 29 May 2000 a hole unexpectedly appeared on the top of Silbury Hill. A shaft had become open to a depth of 14 metres. Despite attempts to safeguard it, in December the top collapsed to leave a large crater, damaging important archaeological deposits.

The secret of Silbury Hill, the most enigmatic prehistoric monument in Europe, isn’t the monument but the monumental effort which went into building it, according to the archaeologist who has spent most of the last year slipping around on wet chalk deep in the heart of the hill.

On a sunny morning last week a local druid scattered Wiltshire grass and wild flower seed on the summit of Silbury, to mark what engineers and archaeologists devoutly hope is the completion of a project to prevent the 4,500 year old hill from collapsing - 10 months and £1m over budget.

Jim Leary, the archaeological director for English Heritage throughout the work, thinks he has solved a riddle which archaeologists have fretted over for centuries: why thousands of people piled up 35 million baskets of chalk into the largest artificial hill in Europe, now part of the Stonehenge World Heritage site. It wasn’t the final structure, but the staggering contribution of work which was important, he now believes, marking a site of immense but only guessable significance to the hunters and farmers of Bronze Age Wiltshire.

We assume the building to be a process towards the final form or function, but this is a very modern and western way of looking at monuments. Instead I suggest that the act of construction was the ceremony, and the final form was the by-product.

Post excavation work will continue for years on the land snails and broken sarsen stones, wisps of still green grass and beetle wings taken from the heart of the hill. Nothing has been left behind except a cable to monitor movement - which they hope will lie idle. They hope that a job begun 4,500 years ago is complete, and no man will ever set foot inside Silbury Hill again.

My thoughts? Have a look at the photograph above. Has anyone considered that the hill was built as a representation of a pregnant womb? Perhaps our ancestors, aware that all life comes from the Earth, built the hill as a place to gather and attempt to conceive with the blessing of the Earth Mother? The search for archaeological remains would be fruitless - the most we could learn being about the methods of construction. As a symbol, of course, the significance of the hill to the continued survival of the tribe would be enormous.

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