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.