I HAD an extraordinary experience the other evening. I had gone down to stay in Marlborough for a few days, to preach in the chapel and to give some lectures and seminars to the sixth-formers at the College there. I arrived at dusk, and was almost immediately whisked off to attend a school concert, which was excellent.
As we walked back afterwards, with the long Victorian chapel on our left, I looked over to my right, peering through the gloaming, and it was as though some veil of time had been lifted and I was gazing into another age. Instead of the Victorian school buildings and dormitories I was expecting, I saw, rising before me, a great green hill, clearly an earthwork mound or barrow, perfectly shaped, with a glimmering white path spiralling up to its summit, and ancient yews clinging to its sides and around its crown. A little mist drifted by in the half dark, and I felt that I could have been gazing on some corner of Middle-earth, or some fairy mound. I half expected the fair folk to issue from that hill, or to be present at the Hosting of the Sidhe.
“Am I seeing things?” I asked my host. “Ah,” he said, “did you not know? That is Merlin’s Barrow, the MerleBerge, as they called Marlborough in the Domesday Book, but of course it’s much older than even Merlin — I’ll tell you about it in the morning.”
He was as good as his word — and better; for I not only learned the extraordinary history of “the mound”, as the school calls it, but was allowed to take the spiral path that encircles the mound six times before it reaches the summit.
Historians, unsurprisingly, don’t take the Merlin legend seriously, notwithstanding the town’s motto “Ubi nunc sapientis ossa Merlini” (“Where now are the bones of Merlin the wise”). But the history is almost more remarkable than the legend. At first, it was assumed that the mound was simply the motte of the Norman castle that had once stood there, which would take it back to the 1100s, although it is far larger than any motte need have been. But some historians wondered whether it might be older still — whether it might have been there already, before the Normans came.
And then, just ten years ago, came an astonishing discovery. Core samples were taken from right through the mound for carbon dating, and “Merlin’s Barrow” was found to date from 2400 BC! It had stood there millennia before the age of Arthur and Merlin. It turns out to be a Neolithic monument contemporary with Stonehenge, and with its bigger sister five miles west along the Kennet at Silbury Hill, which is Europe’s largest manmade prehistoric hill.
As I climbed up the spiralling chalk path to the summit of the Mound that morning, I could see a white horse carved on the flanks of the valley and the sun glinting on the clear waters of the Kennet, the pure chalk stream that rises at Silbury and runs eastward towards the rising sun, down through Marlborough and past this mound.
Even at this date, so remote from its making, I could sense, in that magical alignment of earth, water, and the light of the sun, something of the numinous and sacred geometry marked out by our remote ancestors. Then I gazed from the mound across to the chapel where I would be telling the story of how the Light of Life came to earth, and revealed himself as the true source, offering us a fountain rising in us to eternal life, and I was glad to turn from one sacred place to another.
