Bartlow Hills

Content sourced from Wikipedia, licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.

Bartlow Hills is a Roman burial site in Bartlow, Cambridgeshire, England. Four of the original seven tumuli (barrows) still remain. The three largest are open to the public; the northernmost and smallest lie on private land and aren’t easy to see. The two other smaller mounds are visible as low humps to the west of the big three. The tallest barrow is about 15 metres (50 feet) high, making it the largest Roman barrow north of the Alps. The barrows were built in the 1st or 2nd centuries AD.

In the 19th century, mainly between 1832 and 1840, excavations found walled graves with cremated bodies kept in glass vessels, stored in large wooden chests. Decorated items in bronze, enamel and pottery, plus an iron folding chair, were found, though many other objects were lost in a fire at Easton Lodge in 1847.

There is also a small Roman villa north of the mounds, which was occupied until the late 4th century and excavated in 1852. After a long break, geophysical work was done in 2006 and more excavations in 2007, but these did not locate the villa.