The largest artificial mound in prehistoric Europe: 39.3 metres high on a base 167 metres across, holding 248,000 cubic metres of material, raised between about 2400 and 2300 BC. The labour estimate is 18 million man-hours, which works out at 500 people working for fifteen years. Excavations have gone in repeatedly and found clay, flint, turf, gravel, freshwater shells, mistletoe, oak, hazel, sarsen, ox bone and antler, and an antler fragment radiocarbon dated the build to 2490 to 2340 BC. What they have never found is a burial, a chamber or a purpose. Nobody knows what it is for, and one serious suggestion is that the building of it WAS the point rather than anything inside. You cannot climb it, for good conservation reasons, but it is right by the A4 near Avebury and it is startling from the layby.
Near Avebury, Wiltshire, England
See it on the map
