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The Central Committee received many urgent requests of an examination of the great chalk pile, Silbury Hill (Fig.2.), situated near the ancient banked and ditched stone circle at Avebury and considered to he a giant burial mound, as part of the congress schedule. Merewether was asked to help in the overseeing of this project, and to organise a series of barrow-diggings on the Marlborough Downs, both of which would he visited by parties attending the gathering. On 18 July 1849, as he recorded in his little hook describing his work for the Institute, Diary of a Dean: being an Account of the Examination of Silbury Hill and of various Barrows and other Earth-works on the Downs of North, Wiltshire, he took his residence at the Wagon and Horses Inn at Beckhampton, ran by the Misses Sloper. This hostelry was within sight of Silbury, and close to the Avebury stone circle, which he noted he had not visited for 30 years. He was now within reach of a locality 'studded with tumuli and cairns, and earthworks of endless variety and surpassing interest [which] were known to me from my earliest youth" some of the former of which he had explored many years earlier.
Merewether's first task was to check on progress at Silbury, where a local railway engineer, Henry Bland-ford, had volunteered to direct the penetration of the vast heap by a tunnel, leading in from the south, and measuring some 6 ft high, and 3 ft wide (Fig 3.). Only three workmen could operate at the face of the tunnel, and these were relieved in shifts, day and night, working eight hours at a time. On this first visit, the Dean found that the navvies had progressed some I 20 ft into the pile, driving in the opening, and barrowing the chalk spoil to the outside. A vertical shaft, 5 ft square, had been stink down into Silbury hill Cornish miners, under the direction of the Duke of Northumberland and Colonel Drax in 1777, but this had failed to find anything. The Yorkshire barrow-digger John Mortimer later wrote of the operations that "It could hardly be expected that these two small openings would be likely to find the primary grave under Silbury hill than two rat holes would be likely to come upon the ashes of a mouse placed under a mound 10 feet in diameter."
After his inspection of the Silbury tunnel, the Dean spent the best part of the next month in a thorough investigation of the barrows on the North Wiltshire Downs. With the assistance of a gang of labourers he opened some 31 examples, a rate of progress never equalled, let alone surpassed, in the whole chequered history of 19th century barrow digging.
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