The Lanhill Long Barrow, Wiltshire, England: An Essay in Reconstruction

Abstract

The destruction of barrows and other monuments of antiquity has become an everyday occurrence. In earlier centuries many things survived, as in Ireland in more recent times, by reason of public superstition or veneration, in which the invocation of the fairies and the little people has played a lively part. It is astonishing how much survived the ages of ignorance. There is irony in the situation. For the main onslaught of destruction, it must be confessed, begins in the self-styled age of culture and enlightenment—from the 17th century to the present day—and of this the greatest slaughter is clearly attributable to our own 20th century. The Lanhill Long Barrow, once included among the most important antiquities in Wiltshire, has suffered a typical spoliation. When John Aubrey first described and drew the tomb in the mid-17th century, it must have been nearly complete, save for a certain amount of natural weathering. He wrote that the tenant farmer of his day ‘thought to have digged down this hill for the earth to lay on other land’; but he recorded only three small areas of disturbance marked ‘a’ on his original sketch.

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