Wiltshire Archaeological & Natural History Magazine, vol. 97 (2004), pp. 78-88 
A Welsh Bard in Wiltshire: Iolo Morganwg, Silbury 
and the Sarsens 
by Fon Cannon! and Mary-Ann Constantine? 
A letter written by the Welsh antiquary and Druidic enthusiast, Iolo Morganwg, about his visit to the Avebury region 
in 1777 1s published and discussed. Mis views on Silbury Hill (excavated the year before) and on the nature and origin 
of sarsens and sarsen settings are placed in the context of antiquarian thought, and discussed alongside other Wiltshire 
references in his letters and published works. 
In January 1777 a thirty-year-old Welsh stonecutter 
wrote to a compatriot in London with a vivid 
account of his recent journey through Wiltshire. He 
was Edward Williams, better known as Iolo 
Morganwg, the man whose vision of Britain’s 
Druidic past would have an enormous impact on 
Welsh life and letters, and whose obsessive revision 
of its medieval literature would both inspire and 
frustrate Welsh scholarship for well over a century.' 
Iolo’s vision of a Bardic Institution and the 
patriarchal religion of the Druids owes much to 
antiquarian predecessors like William Stukeley and 
Henry Rowlands; it owes much too, to subsequent 
revolutionary politics, to Thomas Paine’s Rights of 
Man, and to his own Unitarian convictions. And it 
owes something, no doubt, to the laudanum that he 
took from his mid-twenties ‘for a troublesome 
cough’, and to which he remained addicted through- 
out a long and busy life. But at the heart of the 
vision is a sense of place, of history rooted in 
physical remains, in buildings and in stones. In a 
letter from the archive of the National Library of 
Wales (NLW MS 1808Eii no. 1519) presented below, 
we have Iolo’s response to two key sites in what can 
best be described as his ‘historical mythology’ of 
the early British past: and, thanks to a couple of 
crucial details, his observations have a particular 
interest for archaeologists of those sites today, as 
well as throwing new light on seventeenth and 
eighteenth-century attitudes to ancient landscapes. 
12 January 1777 
My Dear Friend, 
I should have wrote sooner to you, but for the 
uneertain uncertainty I was in whether I should stay 
here for two Days together during the late frost, 
which puta stop to our trade. On my way hither I was 
so lucky as to be two days sick on the road. I suppose 
you would not be sorry to have as good an account as 
I can give you of the opening of the Mountaineous 
Tumulus at ABURY. I passed by it, and had the good 
fortune to meet with an inteligent shepherd, who saw 
it open (for it is now shut up) the Gentleman who had 
it opened had the area of its base measured and found 
that it stood upon no less than eight acres of ground 
(which is but little less than that on which the largest 
Egyptian Pyramid stands.) it is high in proportion 
and is never taken by the uninformed traveller but 
for a large natural mountain, there were four coal 
miners from Kingswood Coalmines near Bristol, 
employed for some Months to make a hole down to 
the bottom, they found it to consist of chalk and 
gravel thrown together by the hands of men and no 
natural hill as some doubted it to be, there were many 
| Hillside, Ogbourne St George, Marlborough SN8 1SU_ ? Iolo Morganwg Project, University of Wales Centre for Advanced Welsh and 
Celtic Studies, Aberystwyth SY23 3HH 
