UncleRob

Another fascinating interpretation of this site’s various stages of use. In this version of events, there is a small house of the dead (with porch!) before the palisade is erected or the earth heaped up. It seems plausible that many other long barrows (but not all) had some wooden structure around the bones and in some cases (viz Nutbane) these had even been burnt prior to the heaping up of earth. Did one set of beliefs violently supersede another like the dissolution of the monasteries?

Looking NNE from the top of the ridge, towards Danebury, this big barrow and its two smaller companions would have had a commanding position over the land around the Wallops.

Looking SE, the Turret is in the next field on the skyline.

Looking roughly North into the field with the barrows, from the top of the byway that leads to/from Abbotstone farm. On the left you can see two bumps marked with my bright yellow panier bags on top, and over to the right is the third barrow marked with my red fleece (which is a faint dark dot). Jumpers for goalposts isn’t it?

The barrow occpies a fine position to be seen from around the Chilcomb valey and other hills. This is from Magdalen Hill Down, without zoom, by the (modern) cemetery, a distance of about one and a quarter miles. See the cow on the right? Look at the skyline straight above its backside. There’s a copse on top of the hill and a lower dark mound immediately to the left – that’s your barrow, that is.

The barrow at the east end of the down is next to a footpath but there’s not much left of it. It fills the width of this photo behind the gate and is about 2 feet higher than surrounding pasture. Location SU 515 291.

Here’s the barrow at the East end of the down, seen by peering through a hedge and down the slope. It is the greener patch of grass (slight bump) just below dead centre of the photograph.

What remains of the barrow is a slight mound in centre foreground with the chimney of the Twyford Pumping Station rising directly behind its centre. Yes, you do have to look very closely... and it is being ploughed lower and lower each year.

Seen from the north, as I crossed the field on the “Monarch’s Way” footpath.

Another roaming sarsen? Was it tossed here by a giant sitting over the other side of the river in Badgers Farm? Does his grave now form the embankment where the bottle banks are at sainsbury’s car park? Am I not taking this seriously enough?

Hmmm, could there be a couple of smaller worked sarsens here at the base of the tower (on the side facing the river)?

Barrow to the west (down the road).

Barrow on the east (up the road).

Looking over the Eastern barrow out towards the southwest, the land drops smoothly away under you and you are surrounded by sky.

Western barrow up close – there’s hardly anything left but a slight mound.

Westernmost of the barrows.

Very diminutive bump on the south side of the track, among the trees in a tangled bit of set-aside.

Large mound on the north side of the track. In the distance you can see the gleaming planetarium at the Intech science museum. A nice contrast of Bronze Age mound and Space Age mound. The shadow is cast by the tall cypress trees alongside the track.

Riverside excavations 2008: just at the top of the rise near the end of the Avenue where Stonehenge suddenly appears is a point where some of the carving and shaping of the stones took place. A shallow dig found scattered sarsen and bluestone fragments on the surface of the chalk & flint “bedrock”. Intriguing that both types of standing stones were worked here with such a long time gap between them. The bluestone is on the left and two sarsen chunks on the right.

This is very tricky to photograph, so get your specs on and peer closely. The gate ditch extends from bottom left up to top right, passing in front of Jimit (kneeling respectfully? no just looking for his baccy) and ending up between the orange health ‘n’ safety netting and the blue archaeologist-carrier. It is on the surface about an inch or two’s depression, about 2 feet wide at most. Here, incidentally, we are just outside The Avenue’s “elbow” (there’s a water trough nearby for the sheep) and looking towards Stonehenge, which is just over the rise.

On top of Robin Hood’s Butt

Robin’s Butt close-up

“Robin Hood’s Butt” appears through the trees as you step away from the road.

The “Burrow Road” barrow emerges if you go down the little footpath between the Forestry Commission gravel road and the bridleway-signposted Burrow Road.

The eastern (Burrow Road) bowl barrow

A warm summer evening. Counting from west to east, this is no. 3 seen from no. 4.

There it is, off in the distance. A stepladder and binoculars might have helped...

Much flattened but still proudly on top of the chalky knoll.

Battered and bruised...

One of the fenced-off round barrows near the south-east corner of the National Trust land.

The causewayed entrance on the small section of ditch accessible at the hill fort. Lower stretches of the Test valley in distance.

The larger pair of bowl barrows next to the large single one, seen from the top of the “bank” that they all create.

The largest of the bowl barrows, seen from downhill.

Peering into the woods slightly down the slope to the east on the Clarendon Way footpath, I tried to see the two small barrows marked on the OS map but could only make out this bit of a mound. Hmmm...

The round barrow next door again. There was no sign of humans using the plot as anything but a short cut from one road to another, but once I stopped and took a photo, this local inhabitant came out of the undergrowth to say hello.

Round the back of the long barrow is its neighbour, a similarly flattened round barrow. Both this “West” long barrow and the “North” one were given accompanying round barrows later on.

As seen from the Stoke Charity Road.

Seen from the West end of the barrow

Seen from the East end of the barrow

This photo is looking up from the gate on the bridleway at SU467368. The site of the barrows is on the skyline at centre. Yup, there’s not much to see.

From the centre of the disc barrow, looking back towards the large bowl barrow. In the foreground is the small mound at the centre of the disc barrow. Much harder to see (I took lots of photos from every angle...) is a smaller secondary mound further away and to the right. That makes it north-west of the centre.