in making these short films once a week we often lack the ability to truly Savour something
whether it's on the day rushing from station to Canal lock to Roman Road or whether it's
behind the scenes planning preparing writing scripting editing publishing or promoting
you're often left wondering what that place would look like and feel like if you just
had the time to savor it properly
time flies by even more so and with every day that seemingly passes shorter than the
last I'm often left with a nagging feeling of wanting to leave my mark on the landscape
it's easy to go on and go through life just going through the motions protecting and caring
for the ones that you love and often the ones you don't know you love but being the best
person you possibly can I guess if that's as good as it gets you should probably be
proud but there it is again that nagging feeling I want to leave my mark on the landscape I
want to score that victory for Humanity I want to create value for you I want to leave
my mark on the landscape
today we had the opportunity to meet someone who not only created a Monumental value for
his community but also left that Mark on the landscape he built a long barrow [Music]
[Music] welcome to the long barrow all canning's modern long Barrow built about nine years
ago right in the middle of Pewsey vale this is all canning's the village is just over
there marlborough downs over there Kennet and Canal just running here overlooked by the downs
and I'm looking across that way I can see Adam's grave there's also kitchen barrow another
long barrow so two long barrows looking down on us um it's sort of in a very ancient landscape
and uh this is a modern interpretation
[Music] in a way I don't really know it's a combination of two two or three things one
of them was for a long time I thought would be nice to make a mark on the landscape because
we're surrounded by the hills where there are massive marks on the landscape but that's
not really good enough reason we tend to have a core of the farm we think oh I wouldn't
mind spending eternity there yeah but uh you know most people don't have somewhere special
to put remains the idea of having somewhere special kept going around in my mind talking
about the Neolithic thought well that's what these barrows were these were the community
places that people could come back to and revisit and you know remember and it also
just fell together into a sort of mad idea
one of those lovely Frosty Morning Sun was shining bit of mist in the valley and I suddenly
thought this is the place it really was this is a place 20 minutes later I had the whole
plan in my head just as quick as that um no one else had built one nothing there's no
nothing to go on so I put plenty permission in for it and I hope they turned me down so
I could then spend the rest of my life saying oh goodness I had this great idea but you
know killjoy here but uh but no just it went through very very easily have you ever
done any building you know there's there's planning permission there's also building control
so I then had to bring up building controllers so I want to build this long barrel and they
went ah well you'll need uh your disabled access and lighting and uh can I ring you
back because I've not dealt with one before you've not dealt with one before um but we've
got around that it's a structure so we're all happy so we didn't have to make it to
21st century
I mean the whole ethos of this is it's not a copy it's reimagined to be useful there's
nothing here the Builders of the original long barrels wouldn't recognize they could
cut they could have turned they could turn up here and go see yeah I know exactly how
you built that yeah there's not even any concrete lime mortar to even it out, the stone masons
decided that concrete wouldn't last long enough I got Planning permission but I had no idea how to build
a long barrow why didn't anyone who knew how to do it and it was like great idea now I'm
going to sit on it and we've got to work out how to build it and a stonemason called Garrett
Davis happened to pick up a newspaper on his holidays which didn't normally do and there
was an interview with me about this mad idea he knew immediately how to build it and contacted
me out of the blue yeah and said Tim yeah I know how to build it I said thank goodness
one of us does because I've got no idea so what we wanted to do was obviously have sarsen
and Stone exterior because we are in the land of the sources interior is dry Stone Walling
uh the largest stones are up from very close to West Woods a good source of sarsens don't
um and up there had dug them out when he was building a pit and um they'd gone to the Reclamation
yard and I just happened to find them by accident in the Reclamation yards Yep they're like
you've got sarsens Stones so that's how we ended up with these beautiful Stones biggest
part of this construction so this Barrow is 70 meters long it weighs about 4 000 tons
I know that because we brought the chalk in unlike the ancient Barrows we haven't got any
ditches we originally were going to have ditches to dig and pile I see yeah okay um but talk
to my neighbors and uh oh we're digging a big hole in the ground we're gonna have thousands
of tons of chalk would that help
we've um we've added several little some would called them Easter eggs so there's two two
different sorts of blue stones in there from the same two sorts as we've got for at Stonehenge
there's actually a flint from the Stonehenge field that's in the um wall there's even an
ammonite fossil in the entrance which is a tip to um Stoney Littleton I've even or the
Garen actually even Twisted a couple of the big uprights the big monoliths at the end
10 degrees which is a hat tip to uh Stonehenge where the biggest trilothons Twisted 10 degrees
so it lines up with mid-winter sunrise and sunset okay I think at 80 degrees so little
tiny things that yeah yeah maybe one day someone will notice them and work it out but as you
go in you'll see the sarsen gets smaller and finer and then there's the door with the
non-symbolic symbol on it I'm trying to find something new that was sort of universal yeah
and didn't exclude anybody because we were very and I actually came up with the idea
of um DNA just came to mind yep
great aunt Maud was an important person she gave us so much we want to remember her we
want to do something suitable for her and that is the underlying key to what you're
doing with something like this is you're enabling people to both monumentalize remember people
and provide a space they can come back and remember and that's what they do here a lot
of this is post rationalization we just knew what we wanted to do in our minds and then
you go that's what we want to do it we didn't know why I wanted it but we did
part of the plan was yeah how did we afford this big structure you know
it's not a it's not my folly um and we came up with this well I came up with a sort of
community funding model where people bought the niches inside they reserved the niches
inside and the payment that they gave for the niches paid for the building so at the
end of the day what we within two years it had been fully reserved out right um and all
the building costs were then paid off yeah and we were sort of even then a wonderfully
nice place to be that we didn't have to worry about uh how we were paying this off or anything
like that um so that was the model um the sales were to pay for the building and from
now you know now on you know we just asked for small donations when people come to use
it something like that just to pay for the candles and time and insurance and boring stuff
like that
physically it's you know because of the rain is quite damp we didn't do any damp proofing
it's also very constant temperature um in there but you know as you know to me it doesn't
feel it's not claustrophobic it's quite large it's larger than you probably expect from
here um but as for the atmosphere I think that's for you rather than for me to say what
you feel because I don't put words in your mouth I know what I'm feeling now and I know
what other people felt in there so I'll be interested to see what you think of it
[Music]