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Rubury Butts, Three Barrows Down (Barrow / Cairn Cemetery) — Miscellaneous

This site caught my eye while scanning the map for something to 'bolster up' a planned trip to not-too-distant West Wood... and turned out to be a first-class, primary visit, including possibly the finest surviving round barrows in Kent?

Unfortunately, however, there is a downer in that The Three Barrows are located immediately adjacent to the (cue drumroll)...'North Downs Way', thus inevitably suffering from the attentions of plodding hikers 'doing the way'/French tourists and, far more seriously, moronic trail bikers. Indeed, the 'leader' of one such group of 'broom-broom-halfwits' steadfastly refused to meet my gaze after I countered his 'good morning' with a cold, silent stare - hell, the fool damn well knew riding his farcical contraption here - to the detriment of everyone else - is out of order! Shame on him and his kind.

Having said the above, however, Rubury Butts is still a great place to hang out for a while... since the very substantial northwestern monument is seriously overgrown, the summit a hidden haven of wondrousness.

Historic England summarises thus:

"The three bowl barrows known as Rubury Butts at Three Barrow Down, Womenswold, Kent lie at the convergence of the three parishes of Womenswold, Nonington and Shepherdswell in a lightly wooded copse adjacent to the North Downs Way. They were noted by the C18 antiquarian Bryan Faussett in his Inventorium Sepulchrale published in 1860 who believed that their name derived from ‘’Romes berig Butts’, meaning ‘ the butts at the Roman burial place’. Faussett undertook excavations of Anglo-Saxon burial sites at Golgotha, Shepherdswell and Barfrestone approximately 2km to the east and it is thought possible that these later monuments may have been positioned intentionally within the sight of the three earlier barrows. It is certainly the case that a resurgence of interest in barrow construction took place in the Iron Age, Romano-British, Anglo-Saxon and Viking periods when burials were made in ancient mounds or new mounds were constructed. Nationally barrows are known to have acted as Parish markers as in this case..... It is likely that the Rubury Butts bowl barrow cemetery is Bronze Age in origin.... The barrows are aligned in a row on a north-west to south-east axis approximately 5m apart. The northernmost barrow is 26m across and stands to 3.5m [c11.5ft - G] in height. The middle barrow is 14m wide and 1m high and the third, adjacent to the track, is ovoid in shape, approximately 21m wide and 1.9m [c6ft - G] high, eroded to the south-east by the track. None of the mounds have obvious ditches."

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