Long barrows

A ‘barrow’ is a prehistoric mound of earth and stone, built as a tomb, and intended to be a prominent monument in the landscape. The tradition of burying and commemorating the dead in this way developed in western Europe in the 5th millennium BC and was brought to Britain in the early Neolithic period, from about 3800 BC onwards.

About 200 barrows in southern Britain are of a type known as the Cotswold–Severn long barrows. They are long earthen mounds, often trapezoidal in shape and slightly thinner at one end. The common features of these long barrows are an external entrance space or ‘forecourt’ at the wider end and a stone-built passage or passages leading to burial chambers.

Modern excavation of long barrows (other than Stoney Littleton) has shown that many people – men, women and children – were buried inside. The human remains found include both whole burials and cremated remains. Radiocarbon dating evidence and DNA research show that these barrows were only used for three or four generations, with older human remains being carefully moved at regular intervals to make space for the newly deceased. At nearby Hazleton North long barrow in Gloucestershire, 35 members of the same extended Neolithic family were buried in the tomb.

The trapezoidal shape of these barrows has been compared to Neolithic axes, and to the form of the human torso. Perhaps the dead were understood to be re-entering the womb of the earth after their death. The mounds were undoubtedly important to Neolithic farming communities, both as shrines to visit and as monuments that marked their local landscape.

Excavation and investigation

In about 1760 a local farmer opened the top of the barrow from above to quarry some stone. Half a century later, in 1816, the local rector, John Skinner, and the early archaeologist Sir Richard Colt Hoare excavated the interior of the barrow. They later reported: ‘We met with many fragments of bones, etc, which had probably been removed from the sepulchral recesses [the chambers off the passage].’ As well as the skeletal remains, they found cremated human bone and a pot. Although their excavation was not up to modern archaeological standards, they published their discoveries in the journal Archaeologia, including detailed plans and sections. They also kept some of the human remains they had discovered, some of which are now in the Bristol Museum and Art Gallery.

In 1857–8 the Somerset Archaeological and Natural History Society carried out repair and conservation work at the barrow, rebuilding its retaining wall.