And one tree-crowned long barrow
Stretched like a sow that has brought
forth her farrow
Hides a king’s bones
Lying like broken sticks among the stones.
Andrew Young, ‘Wiltshire Downs’
DRIVING south on the A303 past Stonehenge, the crawling traffic affords travellers spectacular views of the ancient monument, but there are prehistoric riches on the other side of the road, too, in the form of dozens of bowl barrows which are spread out over Salisbury Plain like enormous, inverted green puddings. Marked on the Ordnance Survey map with the familiar gothic italic ‘tumulus’ or ‘tumuli’, they are some of about 20,000 sites of burial mounds or barrows scattered around Britain.
They fall into two main forms: the long barrow, which dates from the earliest Neolithic farming communities (3800BC–3500BC) and the later Bronze Age round barrow (2000BC– 1500BC) which is subdivided into five different shapes—bowl, bell, saucer, pond and the aesthetically pleasing
