A single bowl barrow, in woodland and easily found alongside a track. This is only a few minutes from the Dibden Inclosure car park and if you are nearby, you should definitely also visit the Beaulieu Road barrows.
UncleRob
Herm is a rather special, unspoilt place. No cars or motorbikes, and you can walk around its coastline in a couple of hours. There are several broken and battered small passage tombs, and we only stopped by one (Robert’s Cross). There used to be an enormous menhir on Herm Common but it fell prey to unscrupulous quarrymen. After circling the island we stopped for a beer in the Mermaid and read our newly purchased book “Hidden Treasures of Herm Island” by Catherine Kalamis. I’m not sure that you could buy this anywhere but on the island, but I recommend it for the in-depth history of the island and its owners over the years. Many of them, it seems, found the Common a weird and almost threatening place. I can imagine it gets pretty windswept and bleak, but to us the whole island seemed lovely and well worth a visit (boat from St Peter Port, Guernsey, several times a day). It was my first visit but my wife had been there many times as a child.
Careful when you cross the road, kids! It is next to some cannons. If you spot the cannons, you’re in the right place.
I make no exaggeration in saying that Dehus is possibly the most amazing long barrow type monument I have ever encountered. I suppose it is trumped by La Hougue Bie on Jersey, but Dehus has one very special feature: a man’s face carved into a capstone, looking down at you. There are side chambers and an enigmatic central standing stone that does not reach the ceiling.
Visited on holiday on October 2013. The location of the tomb is not marked or signposted anywhere in the park, but it is in the trees near the car park. Clearly some work was still going on then, or recently, as it was fenced off by some rather unattractive orange plastic. Medium sized stones of up to 5 feet length, arranged now in two elongated rows. The whole is in a hollow where it was (I presume) excavated and has a retaining wall on the higher side.
An elegant dolmen with a whopper of a capstone, a short walk through the steaming woodland on a summer’s day. There is enough of a space to park one car at the brown roadsign. You have to be quick to spot it just to the east of the new TGV line under construction (not on Google Maps yet).
The nearby villages seem to be full of holidaying Brits, what what? If you get a chance, read the heritage information board in Hanc which describes village ceremonies conducted until recently that are straight out of the Golden Bough.
Visited this on a cycling holiday in Brittany this summer. Just before the bend in the D7 going out of Saint-Suliac, walk up the farm track to the right, and you will see a home-made sign to “Menhir”. That leads you into an orchard (there was nobody around when we were there) surrounding this massive stone. It is a very rugged and irregular shape. Whether really a menhir or just a prominent erratic I know not, though the maps show it as prehistoric. There was a huge pumpkin nearby with the name Gargantua carved into it. Menhir a true word spoken in jest, as Obelix might have said (in English translation).
Yesterday, the day before midwinter, I came over to the Cursus with three friends to see the sunset. Does it actually go into Gussage Down long barrow from the original east end of the cursus? (see this summer’s blog at themodernantiquarian.com/post/77897/weblog/ ) I have seen only one photograph of this alignment, in Martin Green’s book “A Landscape Revealed”, so I was curious to see if it really happened as accurately as they say. I wasn’t sure if my chums would think it was worthwhile, lacking in visible earthworks. We had just been to Knowlton in the dying rays of the sun. Nice midwinter alignment there too through the causeway in from the road.
It was about -1 degrees C as we left the warmth of the car and walked down the side of the field. Now in the low sun, the one foot high ridge that seems likely to have been the original eastern end and might have the platform for viewing the sunset was quite easy to see, until you are near it. We stood along the “ridge” and watched the orange sun slide through a thin strip of cloud, more horizontally than sinking. You could get the impression it is gliding down to rest on Gussage Down. A hare ran out in front of us, stopped and had a good long look. I realised that the appearance of that animal inside the cursus bank at the same time 5200 years ago would have been seen as pretty significant, the hare spirit coming to hang out with the high downland folk.
And yes, the alignment does happen. The sun hits the skyline at the long barrow’s SE end and glides along to the NW end where there is just a glimmer left. It disappears into the ground right next to the NW end. These precise alignments are moved slightly by where you stand along the ridge, but not much, maybe half a sun-diameter (15 minutes of arc). When the bank of the cursus was a full 2 meters it would have interfered as well and I think the sun would not have appeared again outside the cursus. We took a few photographs but it was so cold I had to get my hand back in the glove pretty quick.
The sun was down and the old year dead (approximately). We stood there for a bit watching the snowstorm clouds billowing up on the horizon. I went to investigate what looked like some dead creature that had succombed to the cold in the field ahead. It was a battered motorbike tyre, and it had landed around the skull of a rabbit. The symbols abound when you start looking. Jeez it was cold. The flask of tea in the car went down a treat.
Happy new year everybody!
Well and truly ploughed down, and fenced off from the plebs, this was once one of the long mounds flanking the eastern terminus of the Dorset Cursus. Alas, it is not doing well any more.
Grinsell claimed to have found it in 1938, when its ditches were “well-marked”, and then noted that in 1954 when he came to write up “Dorset Barrows”, it was ploughed to the edge of the mound. Sadly the tractors and harvesters and muckspreaders now go straight over the top of this integral part of our national heritage. He notes it as 95 feet long, 70 feet wide [which makes it oval more than long] and 3.5 feet high.
In “A Landscape Revealed”, Martin Green says:
During Colt Hoare’s brief examination of this mound he described it as ‘surrounded by sarsen stones’. Indeed, even now [book published 2000] I have noticed large lumps of sarsen ploughed to the surface around the edges of this mound.
Visited in July 2009 and found the site easy to access, though the base of the dolmen is quite overgrown. The surface of the field within about 8m radius of the dolmen is scattered with small stones and fragments of strange shapes and substances. Quite a few bits thin tubes of flint, some porous stone – or is it bone??? – and what looks like slag from very high temperatures. ‘Tis devilry!
A very pleasant bit of wildish woods in the middle of suburbia. If you need to escape the city and pretend it’s actually 2009BCE then you’d do worse than Croham Hurst. The hill is made of layers of unusual geology and drops away very steeply to the south. Also you can get here in about a fifteen minute walk from South Croydon station. There is little to see of the barrow(s) but the place feels really old and self-sufficient. Nice.
This is a single round barrow on the false brow of the most obvious hillock in the area, overlooking a good expanse of heathland to the south and west. It also overlooks a busy and notoriously dangerous crossroads so don’t expect it to be a sylvan idyll. There is no obvious ditch but that is understandable as a small brick hut was built on top at one point! You can still see the foundations and some bricks scattered about. Hampshire Treasures piqued my interest with the quaint words:
Disturbed by insertion of building.
Fascinating group of four very small and very well-preserved bowl barrows. I wonder if they might be pagan Saxon; I shall have to delve into the records and get back to y’all on that. One of them (the southernmost) has had a big chunk of ditch and the outside edge of the mound dug away fairly recently. Why? Where has the spoil gone?
A group of 8 barrows, spread over an area about 500 x 200 metres. Some of them are on private land but up against the fence and easily visible. One has been heaped up with more earth to make an old rifle butt. The one I visited up close had been dug into in several places by large tunnels – badgers maybe. The soil is quite wet here and that perhaps accounts for the very shallow ditches which have filled up over the millenia.
There are two large barrows togther here on the south side of the road. In passing, they may look like another clump of gorse but they are worth a look because they are quite unusual. Hants Treasures calls them bell barrows but using Grinsell’s taxonomy I would say they are bowl barrows with an outer bank. In Dorset Barrows he has this to say:
Only a very few barrows of this type are known in the whole of Wessex
The bank is shared at the point between the two barrows, making a raised pathway pressed down either by human or equine visitors.
Unfortunately the well-preserved ditches have also been a convenient place for some cretin to dump two lots of concrete fence posts. Boo!
An unusual line of three or four barrows, depending on how you count them. Hampshire treasures suggests there is a bell barrow, then a twin bowl, then another bell, though only two parts, the twin bowl and what I would think is a larger bowl, seem obvious on the ground. The twin has two excavation dimples on top and is more of a oval than an hourglass shape. No, I don’t think it’s a long barrow; it’s aligned north-south, it has 360 degrees of ditches and there are no other neolithic sites in the area. There is a lot of gorse growing on the barrows but they are in good shape, over 2 metres high, and have well-preserved ditches of almost 1 metre depth. None of the barrows seems to have a berm at all. It’s easy to access this site from the track parallel to the road.
On probably the last nice bright winter day before I go back to work on Wednesday, I headed up here today on a long walk out West along the Roman Road and back again. Cold but bright, one of those days that seems almost warm when you are sheltered by trees and catching the sun, but the yellowish snow clouds were never far away with the odd flurry.
And as it’s the best time of the year to see tiny bumps in the ground, I wasn’t disappointed. In fact I was delighted to find the slight ditch and bank visible as crop marks on aerial photos. This is variable and the tufty grass makes it hard to follow except for where it crosses a farm track at the North side of the field. The variation in the surface is generally no more than six inches (!) but there is a startlingly clear curving line of higher cornflowers which follow exactly the crop marks. If you are still reading at this point, then you might just find the images interesting, though I get the feeling I ought to draw a diagram on a napkin and scan it in.
The circle of crop marks seems to cut slightly across the path to the north so I was keen to have a poke around in the hedges and see if any better-preserved ditch was evident. Well, nothing is very conclusive because the path itself has quite deep ditches on either side which certainly post-date the enclosure, but there are deeper sections at two points where one would expect the enclosure ditch to be cutting across. Sheer conjecture and coincidence, I hear you scoff. Probably true. On the other side of the path, between these two intersection points, there is a little bank of about 18 inches height in the yew hedge which may or may not be of significance; it stops where I would expect it to if it was a relic of the enclosure.
One last observation before hitting the road home: the view once the snow clouds cleared is unparalled in this district. Danebury, Popham Beacons, some faraway stuff down southeast (is that Old Winchester Hill? Can’t be Portsdown Hill can it?), St Catherines on the Isle of Wight. 270 degrees of fantastic views.
As Hampshire Treasures rightly says, the entire parish of Kilmeston is in an area of outstanding natural beauty. Not rich in prehistoric sites, but what a pleasure to meander around these deserted lanes visting what there is. These three barrows are ploughed low so best seen in the bleak midwinter when the crops and the sun are both low. They were once pretty big but are near the bottom of a dip in the undulating landscape so not visible except from within a mile or so’s radius. OS maps show the middle of the three to be oval in shape with major axis roughly along the line of the three barrows (NE-SW).
An Explorer map (1:25000) shows the detail. I went by at some speed today and it is indeed hard to spot them. The pub used to be called the Fox and Hounds but is now Milbury’s (geddit?) and is a well-known landmark to anyone plying the road between Winchester and the Meon Valley.
Psychologically it feels like a real crossing point from looking to the East (Meon) and the West (Itchen). Only once you reach this ridge does the landscape switch from one direction of views to the other. And they are pretty good views. It is very, very quiet and empty to the East, which is nice but gets a bit creepy after a while, so getting back to the ridge and seeing the roadsigns to Winchester (rather than Royston Vasey) feels like a homecoming of sorts.
Three and a bit years (gasp!) after Jimit’s fieldnotes, I dropped by today during a leg-knackering bike ride. Still being saved from the plough, hooray! And I was struck by its peaceful location above valleys in three directions. If you approach from the Itchen Valley west of Alresford and then up through Cheriton, you will be following the river to within half a mile of its source (at the other end it forms Southampton Docks). And I strongly recommend that as it’s fairly unspoilt swampland down there (particularly enjoyed the old single track road around Ovington – not to be confused with Lovington, Yavington or Avington, which are all nearby) and you can almost imagine yourself out in your Neolithic get up, hunting ducks and chasing beaver and whatever else they got up to. Then you emerge from the riverland to this peaceful spot.
It’s a rather short long barrow, and its ditches are lost under the plough as far as I can tell. Not clear if it has been excavated. The track which runs east-west past the south side of the field is in good nick and has a gap in the fence next to the long barrow where you can admire.
Impressively large bowl barrow, visible as you walk along the top of Whiteshoot Hill / Broughton Down through the trees. It is however under large-scale ploughing so expect it to get less impressive with each passing year.
Hampshire Treasures says
“Also known locally as Bol’s or Bald Turret. Average diameter 43m, height 3m.”
A fine place for a walk to burn off yuletide excess. Actually it was bitterly cold in the easterly wind today, but the view, the teeming birds and the barrows more than made up for that. And the enormous lunch on the way back in Stockbridge helped too.
Hampshire Treasures lists three barrows here, one bell and two saucers. The saucers were not obvious to me as the whole area is quite lumpy with old field boundaries and trackways, which makes it really interesting to clamber over. A good place to bring non-antiquarian family members as there’s something for everyone. Having said that, there’s no Primark.
The large barrow here has less distinct berm and ditches on the downhill side, though ploughing seems unlikely on this steep hillside. I make both berm and ditch to be narrow, about 3m each and ditch is no more than a foot depression visible on the surface.
Three barrows in a loose triangle arrangement on top of a beautifully isolated and silent bit of downland with views all around. You can get here on foot, bike or horse as it’s a spot where four byways and one bridleway meet. If you are unsteady on the old pins or using a wheelchair your best bet would be the 500m byway which crosses the paved road from Itchen Stoke to Abbotstone.
Sadly, they are being ploughed now and are not as grand as they might have been even just fifty years ago. Two undulations can easily be spotted against the west edge of the field. Pause here to enjoy the birdsong, the big open skies and the views. Ahhhh.
Oddly they are not scheduled, so no info in MAGIC. Hampshire Treasures has little to say but (probably following their LV Grinsell reference at P.H.F.C., Vol. 14, 1938-40, p.353) suggests two of the barrows “may be of the saucer type”. Well, that didn’t automatically seem the case to me. I could just as easily see these as bowls that got plundered for chalk and flints and then excavated and ploughed down gradually. There is also a reference to RAF aerial photograph
CPE/UK/1842/3154/5. I wonder how one finds these... I’m sure there is some MoD archivist out there who would love to hear from the likes of us.
I paced across the field and took some photos, gazed about the place and eventually reluctantly made my way back through some lovely old lanes to civilisation.
I spent my lunch break strolling round the Bronze Age parts of the British Museum today and came home determined to look up the Badbury stone in Grinsell. It’s a bit confusing as he doesn’t use the name the Three Kings at any point, but the barrows in question are probably what he calls Shapwick 5, 6a and 6b (6a having yielded the stone). But although the Museum information says the barrow was destroyed, Grinsell puts it down at 9 feet high and I suspect it has not been destroyed since. Anyway here’s his marvellous description:
“...nearly levelled 1845, but removal of the centre was watched by JHA [J H Austen]. About three inhumations, probably primary, two with food-vessels and one with an ornamented handled pot resembling those of Cornish type; up to 15 cremations (perhaps more), a few possibly contemporary with the inhumations, the majority clearly secondary and a few with E/MBA [early to middle Bronze Age] collared urns of a latish type; as far as can now be ascertained, none was LBA [late Bronze Age]. The barrow consisted of a central cairn of local sandstone blocks enclosed in a ring of flints, which was bordered by a massive wall of sandstone 30 feet diameter, outside of which was a ring of chalk about 15 feet wide, which must have originally covered the mound. The interments were probably all in the central cairn. In the centre according to Durden (not in the surrounding wall as often stated) was the well-known large slab of sandstone which was decorated with carvings of daggers and axes, the former of type similar to those from Stonehenge, conjectured to be of Mycenean type.
from “Dorset Barrows”, 1959.
One of the rarities left near home that I had never visited. I came out for a walk to St Mary’s Church, Twyford and then up the hill and down the pleasant Love Lane with its view across the Hazeley hollow. At the end of the road you pop through into a ploughed (oh yes) field following the sign for the “Monarch’s Way” and the barrow is up the slope on your right. You have to really walk up the edge of the field for a minute or so to see it.
There’s very little left, poor thing, maybe 50cm height over the surrounding field. It would have been quite splendid in its prime at about 15m diameter. Maybe I should have paced over it to measure it out properly and look for any fragments of relic turned up by the plough, I didn’t want to intrude. Like visiting a dying relative in hospital, you feel you ought really to just let them be and stop bothering them.
The Ordnance Survey don’t seem to get their Sitef of ye Olde Antiquitief very accurate round here, showing this as a biggish mound and omitting the Twyford Pumping Station barrows completely.
I came zooming down the hill early one Sunday morning on a bike ride with no particular destination in mind, trying to get home quick before the rainclouds caught me up, and suddenly spotted these two bumps in the sloping field alongside the road. Slammed on the brakes and took a couple of pictures. When I got home I found they are on MAGIC but not on OS maps. They are asymmetrical, lumpy and lovely (I must get out more). You’ll see from the photos that they are at the bottom of a little scarp – why site them there rather than the more prominent top?
If you go up Hazeley Road from Twyford village, you will spot them on your right just after the pumping station. A little further up the road is where Hazeley Down mineral water comes from. I have given them a rather unromantic name but that’s all I could think of, and the pumping station is not without its own charms. There are two other barrows nearby overlooking this formerly hazeley hollow.
Pronounced Chezzit Head. This group of three bowl barrows, spaced quite widely, follow the line of one of the highest ridges in the area, on the south west side. There is a small car park by some trees near the highest point and if, from there, you walk along a path a little way away from the barrows, you can look down into Matterley Bowl, which is the site of an annual music festival which is constantly changing its name. It’s also a very impressive natural undulation with a flat bottom – in about 1995 there was a vast crop “circle” here of a stick man with a football and a halo, over the gigantic words “Le Tiss for England” – anyway, back to the barrows. They have suffered a great deal but they once occupied an absolutely regal position over the downs. The sorry story is all told at MAGIC if you can bear to read it. Eeeh, it makes me mad, it does.
This is a nice spot on top of the hills, with long views north into the upper Itchen valley and west across the sloping downs (well, you would have seen west at the time of construction, but there are now some tall trees). OS maps place ye Tumulus on the south side of the track, where there is just a very tiny bump that might be nothing to do with it. A much likelier candidate is the large mound with a bit of a ditch and a dimple on top on the north side of the track. But you never know...
25m diameter, 2m high. Sherds of Bronze Age pottery and worked flints emerged from the ditch, according to MAGIC. There’s not much more that’s known about it. It’s in relatively good nick and is not being ploughed!
One lonesome and battered bowl barow, but if you’re going along Rhinefield Road west of Brockenhurst, you’ll spot it. Unless you blink. I came cycling to the New Forest the other day with a friend down from London, and was very restrained in taking no diversions from the route for snapshots of other bumps.
Second only to Slap Bottom in the Southern Silly Names League, once I’d spotted this on the map I had to visit really. Now that I’ve done so, I don’t suggest you try to follow. It is pretty inaccessible for this part of the country! Parnholt Wood is gorgeous and well worth a visit but is just over the geological boundary into acidic, sandy soil (viz New Forest) with bogs and badass bracken everywhere. So don’t stray off the rights of way kids. One noticeable thing about this barrow though is how its ditch has survived reasonably well. In these parts, ditches tend to have been silted up and ploughed over.
This is an interesting place (having said that, there’s nothing to see). Flash Earth and other aerial photos will show you, at some times of the year, a faint circle in crop marks, maybe 200m diameter. Hampshire Treasures calls it Iron Age, but offers no excavation evidence or finds to back that up. OS gives it Ye Olde Typeface, but only in the most recent maps. It is right next to the highest place for miles around, with steep sides to north and south, long views to the Isle of Wight, Danebury etc (Fawley Oil Refinery!) and big big open skies. It feels very much like the sort of place that made for neolithic causewayed mortuary enclosures, like Hambledon Hill. It doesn’t seem a logical place to have a farm enclosure, and it would be rubbish as a defensive structure. But I have no more to offer than that. I would love to hear others’ opinions of the place. Next door is a (19th Century)pyramidal white monument on top of a mound which is said by some to be a round barrow, though recent excavations have revealed nowt. Perhaps “excavations” involved radar only? To complicate maters further, I see no causeway in the crop mark, but then the circle is not completely exposed. Is there a square crop mark inside the circle, on the northwest side? Is there a larger patch of disturbed land on the east side, facing the “barrow”? Hmmm. One more thing to bear in mind is that there was an anti-aircraft gun placement up here in the Second World War and some of the crop marks may be down to that.
These are two bowl barrows on top of the west-east ridge of chalk running between Winchester and King’s Somborne. They are quite a decent size for this modest district and fairly well preserved by being in woodland for a long time. There used to be two distinct groups of bowl and disc barrows downhill to the north, all now sadly gone under the plough. The eastern one is next to a bridleway called Burrow Road, which probably took its name from the barrow (beorh). The western one is given the name Robin Hood’s Butt by Hampshire Treasures. They are just over a kilometre apart but are so similar in size and position in the landscape that if they weren’t constructed at around the same time, then one must have been modelled on the other. The grid ref I’ve given is for old Robin’s Butt, which is easy to find if you are passing through in a hurry or can’t get far from a car park through narrow footpaths. There is a small car park next door; facing away from the road, go right through the trees and on the other side of an old line of beeches is the barrow. It is about 20m diameter and 2m high, dimpled from excavation, and with a slight trace of ditch round the outside. There may even have been a bit of a narrow berm but it’s hard to tell with big trees up close. When I visited there was a little vase of plastic flowers on top “in loving memory”. Not a bad place to become a secondary Space Age cremation. But(t) its proximity to the car park meant I also found several broken beer bottles and one lens out of someone’s sunglasses. This could be rich pickings for the 5000CE excavators (actually I tried to remove the rubbish as best I could without a trusty Sainsbury’s bag).
Hants Treasures also claims there are two at the Burrow Road location (SU424295) but I’ve only seen one; maybe the other is still deeply overgrown. There is a Forestry Commission-signposted gravel road (with locked gate) going north into the wood off Sarum Road. Walk up that and just before it turns a little right, look on your right and through the trees you will spot a clearing full of barrow. I make the Burrow Road mound to be about 35m diameter and 3m high, and is dimpled on top from excavation.
I was really chuffed to see that the butterfly folk who keep the nature reserve in excellent condition are now keeping the grass trimmed back on the two very flat barrows to reveal their location for the first time to casual visitors.
A large bowl barrow with tree on top, left otherwise unmolested by the farmer. No real access but you can admire it from the bridleway that passes the south side of the field. Stop and peer over to your right just as it turns into a very narrow and overgrown fotpath. If you are Julian height you will be fine; I stretched and leant and stretched some more and just as I caught a glimpse through the hawthorns, I fell silently and gracefully into some stinging nettles. There are no dock leaves for miles! MAGIC says that excavations created a deep hollow which makes it look like twin barrows from some angles.
There are, we are told, fourteen round barrows on the slopes below the hill fort. Some of these are fenced off, which is probably a wise move as they are all rather delapidated. I wonder how many others might have been on top and maybe got obliterated to make way for the hill fort. As Jimit reports, you can’t see much of the fort because the top belongs to Lord Snooty and he has decided to plough it up, but you can see a nice causeway entrance. The view from there is now blocked by trees but if you go a bit further West you can see across to Danebury very clearly. The two forts must have made an impressive sight flanking the Test valley.
Access is not really possible unless you are happy to climb through a cut bit of fence and past a “No public access” sign. If you do you’ll be rewarded with this compact line of barrows at the edge of a steep but short drop. From west to east there is one largeish bowl barrow, two smaller bowls with shared ditch, another pair with a shared ditch, and a saucer barrow. Alas, my battery ran out here and I didn’t get photos of the latter pair and the saucer barrow. There are also two marked as in the woodland further to the west, but it is hard to make out what might be man-made mounds when peering in from the bridleway. You can see across to Woolbury and Danebury and indeed all the views around here are breathtaking. The aspect that was important to the barrow-builders was very much towards the Test valley. The redoubtable Jimit informed me later in the pub that he thought there was easier access from the track that leads off the Clarendon Way towards the southwest, into Parnholt Wood.
A saucer barrow, a disc barrow, and a bowl barrow, all arranged in a compact triangle. And then someone dug a forestry track through the middle of them at some point between the 1930s and the 1970s. Nice one. The arrangement is very unusual and definitely worth a visit I thought. Well, I didn’t make it. They are well inside private woodland and although I decided to strike out for them for some guerilla photography along the track which actually bisects the barrows, I got spooked. I’m not one for that sort of thing (I’m a statistician you know!) and I usually feel at home in dense woodland but somehow it felt really hostile in there. When I hit a fence not marked on the maps, I legged it back the way I came as fast as I could.
A small bowl barrow and a larger saucer barrow at the side of a field. Easy access from the bridleway down the edge of the field for a quick look. Hooray for the landowner here who has left the scheduled monuments alone. Having said that they have suffered in the past, but you can still make out the dimensions of it all. The arrangement is unusual in that the bowl barrow was raised second and overlapped the edge of the saucer barrow.
This is one of those unusual mounds that are not scheduled ancient monuments, yet have been treated kindly by the modern landowners. OS says Tumulus in that alluring typeface but then they have been known to get it wrong. There is not much to see but a bump of about 50cm height in some rough pasture. It is all quite horsey round here so hopefully will not deteriorate further for future generations. I wonder whether it was ever very big or one of the smaller late bronze age efforts.
Finding this barrow makes up (almost) for the depressing state of most of the other sites in the area. It lay unknown in woodland for a very long time, unploughed and unexcavated, before being found by surveyors involved in the expansion of the nearby A34 dual carrageway in 1979. Given its proximity to the other long barrows around South Wonston, I think it should be regarded as part of that group.
The long barrow suffers from the usual rabbit burrows and tree roots, and at some point people have dug little chalk pits (?) near the edge of the mound but thankfully not into it. The ditches are on two sides and do not seem to meet up round the west end of the mound. Access is relatively simple from nearby rights of way but remember it is in private woodland.
It is 60m long, 20m wide and 2-2.5m high. Berms of 2m wide and ditches of 0.1m deep and 5m wide. (All figures from the official scheduling on MAGIC).
This poor old thing has been obliterated by ploughing. To find the site I had to refer a lot to the Royal Commission on Historic Monuments’ excellent “Long Barrows in Hampshire and the Isle of Wight” (1979, ISBN 0117008370). They make it pretty clear that this long barrow, and its neighbouring round barrow, have been ploughed out of existence, and deliberate efforts were made at some point to flatten it and disperse the chalk across the field. Aerial photos to this day show the ditches but there is nothing to see on the ground. It is on top of a ridge and I started walking round the outside of the field to get up to it but was put off by nearby shotguns. I can’t recommend anyone bothers to visit it but I felt it ought to be recorded here as part of the South Wonston group and testament to how much ancient heritage is already lost.
This is well preserved and is now at the bottom of two gardens. You can see it from the Alresford Drove byway on the north-east edge of South Wonston. The householders keep the grass trim and stop any naughty rabbit burrows, so this is perhaps the best of the local long barrows. Long grass, weeds, junk etc seem to have been tidied up a lot since the 1976 photo in the Royal Commission on Historical Monuments book (Long Barrows in Hampshire and the IOW).
Dropped by last weekend in the sunshine with a couple of friends. I hadn’t been here for 15+ years and had forgotten just how big the disc barrow is. A nice peaceful spot though it is surrounded by housing. You can see the disc barrow clearly on take-off from Southampton airport, but that also means when you’re on the ground the peace is disturbed by a procession of noisy Fokkers overhead.
There are two bowl barrows between the road and the disc, one quite obvious and the other only a little mound about 0.3m high. The smaller one is the only that hasn’t been excavated in the past. Don’t be confused by the information board which gets bowl and disc mixed up!
Sarsen stones are comparatively rare in this district and I think this is the biggest, though who knows what is waiting for future generations waterlogged underneath St Mary’s Church in Twyford...
A pair of quite large barrows at the top of Compton Down, nicely preserved despite being in a thoroughly ploughed field that has covered up any ditch that they may have been. The GPO stuck a telephone pole in the middle of one too. I like telephone poles but there is a limit.
There is one barrow considerably larger than the other and they overlap a bit. They have been excavated in the past but no mention of any findings on the official record. MAGIC notes worked flints visible on the surface. Many barrows around these parts are conspicuously off to one side of a hilltop so they can be seen from down below (or indeed so they can see down there!) but these are right on top and invisible until you get fairly close.
Close-up access requires going across the field which is of course supposed to be rather naughty, though all the dog walkers of Oliver’s Battery seem to do it. I used to live very nearby and even my neighbours whose houses backed onto the field didn’t know what these mounds were! Approach on foot by Texas Drive or from the end of Old Kennels Lane; both involve reasonably flat and easy dirt tracks.
Having seen this marked on the OS map but read Dickie’s fieldnotes, I didn’t hold out much hope for it. But when I stumbled through into the copse it was a real jaw-dropping moment. It was late autumn and a bright day with sun coming through the golden leaves and there in front of me was a beauty of a long barrow, the entire width of the copse. MAGIC says 72 metres long, 22m wide at east end and 17m wide at west end, and 2m high. OK, it’s no West Kennet, there are trees growing out of it and rabbits living in it, but that’s not bad for 5000 or so years old. I think I must have a soft spot for antiquities overgrown by woodland, there is some extra tranquillity and mystery about it. Anyway, my top tip is to sneak up from the road further east from Dickie’s approach. There is a gate leading into woodland and from that you can turn right into a field. Look back down toward the road; if you are in the right field there should be a old fallen tree trunk down at the bottom. Walk away from the road and go straight ahead into the copse. No sign of who owns the land but it is easy to visit without damaging any crops, fences etc.
Also, the pin on the Google map is in the wrong copse... it’s the next one to the north.
Well worth a visit if you are in the Winchester area, these are off the Alresford road in a nature reserve for butterflies opposite St Swithun’s School and next door to the masons’ lodge. You can easily walk there from town (well, you do have to puff up a hill of course). Wonderful view across the hills and over the Chilcomb valley. Believe it or not these were the first barrows I ever encountered, so they are in part to blame for my interest! I still like coming up here early in the morning to reset the brain. It’s not exactly a secluded spot but it’s very peaceful. MAGIC gives lots of details, including archaeological finds. There are five barrows here though you are likely only to count the easternmost three as the others are a shadow of their former selves. There is also a further barrow at the east end of the down.
Just to the east of St. Catherine’s Hill (SU 492277 and surroundings) are what remains of the Dongas, the ancient trackways leading down off the South Downs into the valley of the River Itchen and either to ford the river at what became Winchester or to the main entrance to the hillfort on St Catherine’s Hill. I’ve posted a few photos of that area on this site, though they could deserve one of their own. Thankfully a strip of nature reserve is preserving this landscape, though the western end of them was chopped off in the infamous Twyford Down motorway cutting. Easily found (he says – I only recently discovered the main part of them after walking past them oblivious for many years). At the top of Plague Pits Valley, cross the footbridge over the motorway, pausing to make out the faded 1990s Donga Tribe graffiti. The noise pollution here is terrible! You can also come up a path from Garnier Road opposite the St. Catherine’s park & ride car park, which is more direct but less interesting. On the other side of the M3 chasm, go through a gate on your right and then look out for gaps in the bushes to your left, before you reach the top of the slope and another gate. The dongas are waiting for you through there! You get a real sense of the land opening up into a dry plateau, real Thomas Hardy stuff, with a big sky where you can get caught by rain clouds sweeping in off the Channel. Whenever walking about here with my mother, she often commiserates with the ancient folk who did their daily grind up here “without any Long Johns”!
Visited the site in May 07 and found it quite easily between the flat sandy beach and a rocky outcrop behind the stones. There is a little cave at the foot of the hill, off to one side, and when both stones were standing they would have been side by side when facing inland. They could have appeared as a gateway to the hill, or to the sea.
Everything people say about this being a magical place is quite true. You can’t help but be quiet and respectful as the stones appear one by one, forming a broken and scattered circle. ShropshireTraveller has posted a map at the Megalithic Portal website (see link off main Rempstone page) that is pretty accurate from my visit to this site in September ‘07. I would just place the layby a bit further west. I recommend anyone planning a visit to print that map off first. The shrubs and nettles have grown a lot by the verge of the road since the 2004 photos you see here, and you won’t be able to see the stones from the road, but you can still get in easily enough. Just before the autumn equinox , the sun set into the base of the ridge of Nine Barrows Down as it stretches away to the west.