The Wiltshire Long Barrow Gazetteer

The Wiltshire Long Barrow Gazetteer - https://timdaw37.github.io/wiltshire-long-barrows/

A hundred and twenty-nine Neolithic long barrows on the Wiltshire chalk — HER certain and possible, plus one modern mound at All Cannings that is mine. Gold markers you can trust; grey ones you should treat as possible. Where the earthwork still shows on the LiDAR chip, a rim arrow marks the long axis of the mound: the line of the bank, not the way a façade “faces”. Eighty-six arrows. Forty-three sites with no arrow, because nothing usable is there to measure.

People have always wanted a sentence for the set. They face the rising sun. They run along the ridges. They stand on the skyline, landscape controllers, meant to be seen from below.

We measured all three.

They do not face the sun as a shared design. The eighty-six axes spread. There is a gentle east–west smear and no spike at midsummer or midwinter. Give a random set of arrows the same two solstice targets and chance is as close as the real mounds. They sit nearer the contour than luck would put them. They do not glue themselves to the ridge. Half the sample is still more than thirty degrees off the local ground. West Kennet rides the nose of its spur. East Kennet, a mile away and the same tradition, cuts across it.

They do not stand on the skyline always either. Adam’s Grave does, and West Kennet, and a handful of others.  South Street and Lanhill, good surviving mounds, fail the test: often visible, almost never the crest against the sky.

Field, McOmish, Ruggles and Roberts already said so in other words. The map and the two notes are that argument with arrows on it.

Eighty-six Wiltshire long-barrow axes, each drawn both ways. The dashed lines are sunrise on a flat horizon at this latitude: midsummer, equinox, midwinter. They are drawn so you can see them. They are not a finding.

The longer notes:

• Do Wiltshire’s long barrows face the sun? — bearings, ridges, the 86.
• Do Wiltshire’s long barrows stand on the skyline? — length-shows approaches, Kitchen and West Kennet photographs, the maps.