Upton Great Barrow belies its name in the sense that you'd not know it was there without a map. Like many of the barrows in this area, it is hidden in trees - in this case hidden all around, and fenced off to boot, but at least very near a trackway.
A Bronze Age bell barrow, 175' wide, and formerly with a bank around the ditch.
Alas some philistine has put some kind of ugly water container on the top.
(ST 95554230) Upton Great Barrow (GT) (1) Upton Great Barrow was described and planned by Hoare and is identified by Grinsell as a bell-barrow with outer bank, the mound 78 feet in diameter and 10 feet high, with a berm 6 feet wide, now almost overspread and a ditch 21 feet wide and a foot deep. The bank is 21 feet wide and six inches high. It was opened by a labourer digging flints, prior to 1812, who found bones and ashes. Cunnington dug it and found a shallow grave containing a primary cremation accompanied by a necklace of faience, lignite and amber beads. Cunnington made several sections of the mound, finding potsherds, stag's horns, animal bones and vast quantities of ashes and charred wood. (2-3)
Upton Great Barrow now has the appearance of a bowl barrow with a ditch and outer bank; all traces of the berm have disappeared. The central mound is 2.5 m high, the ditch about 0.8 m deep, and the surrounding bank 0.2 m high.A short length of the outer bank has been destroyed by a trackway on the southern side of the barrow.
Hoare wrote in 'Ancient Wiltshire' that William Cunnington had found a cremation in this barrow, accompanied by "forty-eight beads, sixteen of which were of green and blue opaque glass, of a long shape, and notched between so as to resemble a string of beads; five were of canal coal or jet; and the remaining twenty seven were of red amber; the whole forming a most beautiful necklace, and such as a British female would not in these modern days of good taste and elegance disdain to wear."
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Posted by Chance
Posted by Rhiannon
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