We’re here at the Nympsfield long barrow.
It’s situated right on the Cotswold escarpment with impressive views, but in fact it’s
one of about a hundred such long barrows scattered across this part of the Cotswolds.
Now these long barrows were built by early farming communities – Neolithic groups as
we know them – around about 3,800 BC.
They were primarily built as burial places and they put in the remains of their community
to give them a long term future.
But they were also monuments that connected those communities with their landscape.
The capstones I’m afraid are missing.
They were taken long ago.
But we can appreciate the site and we can understand a little bit about it worked how
it would have looked in Neolithic times.
We’ve got the entranceway and that provides if you like a little vestibule inside, then
we’ve got these extraordinary stones which constrict the entranceway and by constricting
them we create this new space beyond which is essentially the passage leading into the
main part of the tomb.
It’s in this area that the burials were placed.
Now, these monuments lasted for about three generations - perhaps 75 or 100 years in total.
And over that period they would accumulate about 30 or 40 corpses – burials placed
in here.
Now they didn’t keep them as corpses, they brought them in and as they decayed bits of
bone would be moved further and further into the chamber, so that we’d have little piles
of skulls, we’d have little piles of long bones, we’d have piles of other body parts.
Which means that as you came in here to visit these people you would have quite literally
been walking on the bones of the ancestors.
We also have to remember that the tomb itself may have symbolic meaning.
The shape of the mound may well be the shape of an axe for example.
Or perhaps it was the form of a human torso.
Perhaps a female torso such that the chamber represented the womb and the dead were being
placed back into the womb as if they were going back in the earth and back into the
mother.