Made a point of looking for this feature, along with its neighbouring tumulus, when visiting Uffington Castle this afternoon.
Marked on the O.S. map between the hillfort and the white horse, this mound is easily missed unless you where dogged enough to hunt it out.
It would appear that the mound has not been reinstated since it's excavation in 1857/1993 and it's original shape and height would have been considerably larger. Hard to believe that 46 bodies have been unearthed here.
A Neolithic long barrow situated on a north west facing slope, 70 metres north of Uffington Castle on Whitehorse Hill, an area in the care of the Secretary of State. The barrow also forms the focus for a later Romano-British inhumation cemetery.
The barrow has a mound aligned south west to north east which measures 25 metres long and 12 metres across at its widest point, with the widest end facing the north east. It stands up to 0.3 metres high and was originally flanked by two quarry ditches which have become infilled over the years.
A circular depression on the centre of the barrow represents an excavation shaft dug in 1857, from which a cremation in a large coarse urn was recovered. This excavation also demonstrated that the mound formed the focus for 46 skeletons buried in 42 graves; five individuals had coins in their mouths which dated them to the late Roman period.
Partial re-excavation and geophysical surveys undertaken in June 1993 have proved that the majority of Roman burials remain in situ and that the cemetery extends an unknown distance around the long barrow and its ditch. The excavation has also demonstrated that many of the skeletons lack skulls. Scheduled.
According to L V Grinsell in his book White Horse Hill and surrounding country:
'Between Uffington Castle and the White Horse is an oblong mound which was opened in 1857 by Mr E Martin ATkins, when forty-six skeletons were found in forty-two graves nearly all of which were placed east/west. Five of the skeletons had small bronze coins placed in their mouths, and these were evidently Roman or Romano-British burials, the coins being placed in the mouths of the deceased, after the well known Roman custom, for the purpose of paying the Charon for ferrying them across the River Styx to the next world. The ages of the people represented by the skeletons varied between 1 and 70 or more, and they were of both sexes. Four of the skeletons were headless. One of them was accompanied by a vase of red ware, probably Roman, which is now in the Roman Room at the British Museum. In the centre of this mound there was a coarse urn with two handle like bosses, filled with burnt bones and arched over with sarsens. This find rather suggests the possibility that the mound may originally have been a round barrow which was later altered in shape to contain the forty-six Roman or Romano-British Skeletons.'
This slight oblong shaped mound was first excavated by Edwin Martin-Atkins (local landowner) in 1857 and 1858 where he found 46 inhumantions and a few cremation burials. The site was re-excavated in 1993 and from the findings it is accepted as orignally a Neolithic burial site.
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