Long barrows are the burial places of Britain’s early farming communities and are the oldest monuments surviving in our landscape. These earthen mounds acted as funeral monuments during the Early Neolithic (3700-3500 BC) and reveal much about the communities buried within them. Peter Marshall, Historic England’s Scientific Dating Coordinator and Jonathan Last, our Landscape Strategy Manager, take us through new findings from an extraordinary long barrow excavated over a century ago. Wor Barrow Wor Barrow lies within Cranborne Chase inRead more
Posts tagged: #Barrows
A Brief History of Burial
As religious beliefs and the location of human settlements have developed over time, so have our burial rites and memorials to the dead. Our knowledge of these rituals is instrumental in understanding the communities which have inhabited England throughout our known history. Sites such as the recently uncovered Anglo Saxon cemetery in Norfolk, in an excavation by archaeologists from MOLA and funded by Historic England, open up the history of our attitude to death and inform the protection of theseRead more
A Brief Introduction to Bronze Age Barrows
Round barrows were created in every part of England, mainly between 2200BC and 1100BC, but many have been destroyed. They can be identified as round mounds, often surrounded by a ‘ring ditch’ from which the earth and stone for the mound was dug. There are many famous groups of Bronze Age barrows within the Stonehenge World Heritage Site (WHS). The Stonehenge WHS Landscape Project was able to reconstruct the history of the barrows by combining a new survey of theRead more