Robert M Heanley was told this version “by a native of Melksham, whose family has been settled thereabouts for at least three centuries, and has handed on the tradition from generation to generation:
When Stonehenge was builded, a goodish bit after Avebury, the devil was in a rare taking. ‘There’s getting a vast deal too much religion in these here parts,’ he says, ‘summat must be done.’ So he picks up his shovel, and cuts a slice out of Salisbury Plain, and sets off for to smother up Avebury. But the priests saw him coming and set to work with their charms and incusstations, and they fixed him while he was yet a nice way off, till at last he flings down his shovelful just where he was stood. And that’s Silbury.
Mr Heanley adds: ‘Only those who have seen Silbury can appreciate the size of that shovelful’.
Usually the Devil’s trying to flatten churches, but it sounds like he hates all religions equally?
This is from some correspondence in ‘Folklore’ volume 24, December 1913.