Well here we are at Windmill Tump near the village of Rodmarton in Gloucestershire at
a very splendid example of a Neolithic long barrow.
It’s situated here in the rolling countryside of the Cotswolds in an area where there are
a great many long barrows.
Now this long barrow is essentially a burial monument from around about 3,800 BC and it
was built by the first farmers who came into this area, people that we know as the Neolithic
farming community.
There’s two different kinds of long barrows in the Cotswolds.
Some of them like Nympsfield have their chamber at the end of the mound and you access it
through the forecourt.
In other cases the chambers are accessible by short passages leading in from the side
of the mound.
And what we have here at Windmill Tump is an example of that.
The side chambers are where they originally put the burials and all of them would have
been used for burials, and in this barrow there were probably about 35 or 40 people
buried.
At the end of the excavations in the 1930s they did of course refill the chambers so
we can’t see and we can’t get into them.
But we can just about make out behind me the evidence for where the passage led out of
the side of the mound down into the chamber.
Well behind me is the forecourt which in a sense is the area in which the ceremonies
and activities took place around the barrow.
Now in this case because there’s no entrance into the chambers at the back of the forecourt
we have instead a couple of large stones which are all that’s left of what’s often referred
to a false portal – in other words it was a replica gateway or replica entrance into
the tomb but it didn’t actually take you anywhere.
In the forecourt we might expect to find hearths and we might expect to find some of the relics
of what was going on there in the past and it’s possible they put some of those things
on the wall of the forecourt as part of those ceremonies.