Silbury Hill

At 129 ft high, Silbury Hill is the tallest prehistoric man-made mound in Europe and one of the largest in the world. There is nothing inside it other than chalk, clay, rubble and soil, and there is no big hole to account for the materials used in construction. It would have taken 500 labourers 15 years to complete.

I used an AF Zoom-Nikkor 70-300mm f/4-5.6G lens to photograph the mound. I have owned two of these lenses and sold both. They are not designed for demanding standards of quality, and not very well built either. Yet within their limitations they can turn in a decent image. They need to be well stopped down, and not used beyond 200mm. Here, the focal length is 78mm and the aperture f/11, with a shutter speed of 1/640th to ameliorate the effect of shaky hands being magnified. The main advantage of this lens is its light weight, useful when tramping over fields for three or four miles.