Just South of Bath in North Somerset, this is one of the best preserved long barrows in the UK. It’s in quite an isolated bit of countryside and not terribly easy to locate unless you have a large scale OS map and enough time on your hands. The main attractions are that you can go inside it, that it has seven burial chambers, is over 5,500 years old and that one of the entrance stones has the impression of a fossilised ammonite in it. What more could you ask of a site?
Though it is well preserved it has been subject to some renovation over the centuries so just how authentic it is is open to question. Our Georgian and Victorian ancestors showed no remorse in reassembling some of these sites with a little bit of artistic or fanciful license. Excavated in the early 1800s the burial chambers contained the bones of several individuals and some of the bones had been burnt. Possibly there had been a change from excarnation to cremation of the dead at some point in the barrows use.