The Sanctuary was observed by the antiquarian William Stukeley. He drew a picture of it on 8 July 1723, at which he called it the Temple of Ertha. This was Stukeley's own variant of Hertha, a name that was current among seventeenth and eighteenth century antiquarians and which was based on a reading of Tacitus' Germania, a first-century book which claimed that the Suebi of northern Europe worshipped a goddess named Nerthus. When Stukeley returned and did more fieldwork at the Sanctuary on 18 May 1724, he referred to it instead as the Temple on Overton Hill. Stukeley noted that local people called it The Sanctuary. The archaeologist Stuart Piggott later noted that this was a rather improbably name for rural folklore, and suggesting some seventeenth-century antiquarianism at work.