Country Walking Magazine (UK)

VIEWS WORTH SINGING ABOUT

Little Solsbury Hill, Bath

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“Climbing up on Solsbury Hill, I could see the city light. Wind was blowing, time stood still, eagle flew out of the night.” So begins Peter Gabriel’s jaunty debut single inspired by a flat-topped hill on the north-east fringes of Bath. The original lead singer of Genesis regularly walked up Little Solsbury Hill when he lived in Somerset’s Woolley Valley. A triangular Cotswold offcut, it rises to 625 feet (191m) above the village of Batheaston (curiously, there is no Big Solsbury Hill). About 2300 years before Gabriel went solo in 1975, Iron Age people cut ramparts into its oolitic limestone, whittling the top into commanding hillfort. Sometime later, circa 496 AD, it was the stage for a decisive British victory over the Anglo-Saxons, or so the legend goes. The Battle of Badon has been pinned on several hills in western Britain, including Bathampton Down on the opposite side of the Avon Valley. Having been a barley field in the 1700s, Little Solsbury Hill’s summit plateau reverted to grassland in the 19th century, and was donated to the National Trust in 1930. It has been a popular haunt for walkers ever since. You probably won’t see a nocturnal eagle here, but the views over Bath’s Georgian cityscape are sure to make your heart go “boom-boom-boom”.

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Bathampton Down is the island in a swirling sea of cloud engulfing the Avon Valley below the ramparts of Little Solsbury Hill.
SOLSBURY HILL SUNRISE Bathampton Down is the island in a swirling sea of cloud engulfing the Avon Valley below the ramparts of Little Solsbury Hill.

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