A tomb with a view

Long or round, large or small, prehistoric tumuli dot the countryside. Vicky Liddell explores the history, folklore and literary influence of burial mounds or barrows and reveals how they were nearly lost to the 18th-century digging mania

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 (2000BC1500BC) which is subdivided into five different shapes-bowl, bell, saucer, pond and the aesthetically pleasing disc barrow with its well-defined ditch and bank. Although older, the long barrow is the more complex, with passages and stone chambers that held the remains of up to 50 people. Rectangular or lozenge-shaped, these long mounds of earth are anywhere between 65ft and 394ft long and are thought to have been used as shrines for the living, as well as tombs for the dead.