GLOS. Cirencester: (S)Tarbury barrow. 'East of the town, about a quarter of a mile, is a mount or barrow called Starbury, where several gold coins have been dug up, of about the time of Julian, which we saw.' This must be the same as Tar Barrows, from which an account written about 1685 refers to urns full of coins among the finds, the rest of which show the story to have been greatly 'improved' in the telling.
W. Stukeley, Itin. Curios., 2nd edn. (1776), 67; Trans. B. and G.A.S. 79 (1961), 51-2.

To see any English legend as having derived from imaginative response to a chambered tomb is premature until alternative explanations have been ruled out. At Torbarrow Hill near Cirencester, for instance, two men are reported in 1685 to have 'discovered an entrance into the hill, where they found several rooms with their furniture'. That is exciting - one immediately thinks of them stumbling across something out of the Cotswold-Severn group. But the story goes on, getting wilder, with Roman urns, coins, groaning heads, and a figure in armour that strikes out the light. The details are taken from mediaeval legends of the magician Gerbert, probably via the Gesta Romanorum, and there is no long barrow at the site. Instead, the two men challenge credulity by claiming to have entered the hill itself, sinking a gravel pit twelve feet down and then working sideways. The fact that pamphlets of this kind were frequently made up by some London publisher a hundred miles away does not help our unbelief much either.

In a recent essay, Piggot [Piggott, Stuart, 1976. Ruins in a Landscape. p77-99] argues persuasively that this story, placed at 'Colton's Field' within two miles of Cirencester, conforms to an International Popular Tale in vogue in the late 17th century, and that its location near Cirencester may have been provided to add plausibility to the story which was probably without factual basis.