Clandon, round barrow (SY/656890) 2.25 miles SW of Dorchester, 0.25 mile E of Winterborne St Martin and the B3159 from Upwey to the A35. Finds in Dorchester Museum.
This is a large bowl-barrow, over 80 ft. in diameter and nearly 20 ft. high. It contained one of the richest and finest groups of grave offerings in Wessex. The barrow was dug in 1882 and its main burial never reached. Above this, however, there was a pile of flints among which were a bronze dagger, a lozenge-shaped gold plate, a shale mace-head with decorative gold studs, a cup carved from a lump of amber and a pottery incense cup. These belonged either to the primary burial or to a cremation added later. Above these there was another cremation deposited in a fine collared urn, and near the top there were 2 skeletons in stone-lined graves which may be Romano-British or pagan Saxon.
The gold lozenge plate should be compared with that from Bush Barrow, Normanton (Wiltshire). Parallels in shale to the amber cup have been found in Wiltshire (in Salisbury Museum) and also in amber from the Hove Barrow (Brighton Museum).
The mace-head is one of the most remarkable objects of this period in Britain. It is cushion-shaped, perforated to fit on to a wooden handle and with five gold-covered conical plugs let into it. It suggests that at least 1 burial in this barrow is that of a chief. Date, c.1,700 1.400 BC.
Guide to prehistoric England - Nicholas Thomas 1976
Northwest of Maiden Castle, this barrow was excavated by Cunnington in 1882. It is important for the finds from the site which included fragments of an incense cup, a broken dagger, a macehead made of shale which originally had 5 inlaid gold bosses and a patterned gold lozenge similar to the one found in the Bush Barrow near Stonehenge.
A bowl barrow situated on a chalk ridge, overlooking the Frome Valley to the north. The barrow, which is known as the Clandon Barrow, has a mound composed of earth, chalk and flint with maximum dimensions of 30 metres in diameter and circa 3 metres in height. The mound is surrounded by a ditch from which material was quarried during the construction of the monument. This is no longer visible, having become infilled over the years, but it will survive as a buried feature circa 3 metres wide. The barrow was partly excavated by Cunnington in 1882, when a cremation burial within an urn, a copper dagger, shale mace head, bronze ring and gold plate were all recovered. The excavations did not extend to the primary burial. The finds from the excavation are now held in the Dorset County Museum. Scheduled monument number 451916.
Clandon Barrow, of bowl type (SY 65648900) - in prominent position above 300 ft. contour on flat ground at W. end of local ridge. Diam. 90 ft., ht. 18 ft. Markedly conical in profile. Cunnington partly excavated the mound in 1882 without reaching primary burial, and bottom of his pit being probably 9 ft. above original ground surface. About 6 ft. from the top was flint cairn about 1 ft. thick and 8 ft. in diam. Below it, sherds of an incense cup were scattered on a layer of white clay; among the flints were fragments of an amber cup; and on the flints were a grooved copper dagger with traces of a wooden sheath and an attached small bronze ring, a quadrangular gold plate and a shale mace-head with five gold-capped bosses. 1 ft. higher was a cremation in a crushed, typologically early, collared urn on a thin layer of ashes and small flints. 4 ft. higher and 2 ft. from the top of the mound two stone-lined graves, possibly Romano-British, lay E.-W. 4 ft. apart, each with an inhumation on a layer of fine sand. The mound largely consisted of layers of sands, clays and gravels.
Finds in Dorset County Museum. (2-3)
SY 65638900. Clandon Barrow, (name not confirmed), lies in arable. It is very steep sided, and although not ploughed over it has been damaged by ploughing at the edges. Diameter 30.0m, height 5.5m, with a flat top of 5.0m diameter: there is no visible ditch.
Re-surveyed at 1:2500 on MSD. (4)
Clandon Barrow, Winterbourne St Martin 31. Of the finds from the excavation (Authy 2 and 3) some of which comprise a 'Wessex' I grave group, the macehead is of jet, the grooved bronze dagger is Gerloff's Amorico-British B (Cressingham type), the collared urn is Primary Series and the 'incense-cup' is a bipartite accessory vessel. (5)
SY 656890 (SY 68 NE 23) and SY 665894 (SY 68 NE 26). Two round barrows on Clandon Farm. Scheduled. (6-8)
The assemblage of material from the barrow is reinterpretted in the wider Atlantic and European context. The assemblage possibly represents a much deeper religious significance for the site than had hitherto been recognised. (9)
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