A WELSH BARD IN WILTSHIRE: IOLO MORGANWG, SILBURY AND THE SARSENS 83 
interest in the stones and monuments he passed on 
his way home. 
THE SARSENS 
As the second half of the letter shows, Iolo had also 
visited the sarsen spreads centred on Fyfield Down, 
presumably (though not necessarily) at the same 
time as he passed Silbury Hill. Silbury was on the 
main coach road from London to Bristol and Bath 
(today’s A4), roughly following the valley of the 
River Kennet. Fyfield Down could have been 
accessed from this road by going up one of the six 
side-roads shown on Ogilby’s map of 1675, by 
walking up a sarsen-filled valley such as 
Piggledene, or by leaving the turnpike at Marl- 
borough (which was set up in 1742-3: Crittall, 1959, 
266-71). Whichever way he came up, Iolo would 
have joined the Old Bath Road, a route over the 
Downs from Marlborough which was for many 
years the major connection between London and 
Bristol (indeed, the hollow ways cut by the weight 
of traffic along it can still be seen on the side of 
Overton Hill).. This higher road, which is still a 
bridleway, bisects Fyfield Down, and while coaches 
avoided it after the turnpiking of the valley road 
because of the many stones it remained popular 
with pedestrians (Watts, 1993; Chandler, 2001, 250; 
and Phillips, 1983); in fact, although turnpiking 
was the decisive moment for the valley road, both 
roads were probably used, depending on 
circumstances, for many years (Fowler, 2000, 22). 
Iolo is likely to have used both routes at different 
times: as turnpikes were free to those on foot, there 
was no reason for him to avoid the valley road past 
Silbury Hill, while the road across the Downs and 
through the sarsens remained formally open to all 
traffic until 1815. 
The higher road had thus been travelled by 
many of the ‘great and good’ of society, and from the 
seventeenth century on, the sarsen stones appear in 
various letters and publications. Indeed they 
became something of an attraction: Camden 
mentions them in 1607, describing the Kennet as 
running ‘through fields, all over which great stones 
like rocks rise out’ (p. 93); John Ogilby’s Britannia 
(1675), a gazetteer and guide to key routes, points 
out that en route from Marlborough to Bath, one can 
view the ‘Multitude of Stones disperst’ (p. 21). Over 
a century after Camden, Stukeley confirms that it 
was ‘the topic of amusement for travellers, to 
observe the gray weathers on Marlborough downs’, 
(Stukeley 1776, p.14) while a 1792 guide to the Bath 
Road devotes several pages to the ‘exceedingly 
hard’ stones which ‘lie scattered irregularly, along 
the sides of a valley on the right of the road’, noting 
that some of these clusters are ‘placed in 
semicircular forms’ (Robertson 1792, 28 and 38-39). 
Iolo’s description is not dissimilar. Indeed, he 
gives the same paradoxical impression of both 
chaos and regularity, noting that the stones ‘all lie 
on the face of the ground in a confused manner’, 
and that ‘about 1000 acres of land on the Downs 
next Marlborough are covered with these kind of 
stones mostly either in streight or in circular rows.’ 
Anyone who knows Fyfield Down will recognise 
the aptness of this: the scattered sarsens do indeed 
sometimes form rows and arcs, partly because, as we 
now know, they were cleared to the edges of newly- 
made fields as early as the Bronze Age (Fowler 
2000). It is this curious ambiguity of patterning, the 
blurring of the boundaries between the natural and 
artificial, which lies at the heart of the debate about 
the stones from the beginning of antiquarian 
interest in them. 
In this letter, Iolo is firmly persuaded that the 
Greyweathers were ‘evidently thrown together by 
the hands of Men’, vividly describing them as ‘a 
Carnedd so stupenduous as to have been taken 
hitherto for a natural mountain of dry stones’. The 
‘confused manner’ of their arrangement, far from 
indicating the random disposition of nature, is 
proof of their human design (his opinion that 
natural ‘Rocks are always found in regular beds’ is 
very much the observation of a stonemason, as is 
the knowledge he shows of the location of quarries 
in the area). Here, he is restating an idea that, in 
various forms, had been in existence for some time. 
Other observers held these strange, foreign-looking 
stones (they are said to be named after ‘Saracens’) to 
be artificial not only in their lay-out but in their 
very composition. As early as 1607, Camden says 
‘some [...] think these stones not natural or hewn 
from a quarry, but made of fine sand and some 
unctuos cement’ (Camden 1607, 93).° Robert Gay, 
in 1725, took issue with Inigo Jones’s theory that 
they were the source or quarry for Stonehenge, 
declaring ‘I am confident that they are saxa factitia, 
great artifical stons, made of many small naturall 
Stones’ (cited in Legg 1986, 43). Childrey, in 1661, 
on the other hand, was ‘clearly of the opinion that 
they are naturail stones’, and a testimony to the 
wisdom of Nature, who would apparently consider 
it proper to ensure large amounts of stone were 
gathered together in any area which otherwise 
