Summary

Bowl barrow at east entrance to Ivinghoe Beacon.Part of barrow cemetery. It is 15 metres wide and up to 0.5 metres high on its north side where the ground begins to slope. It is a classic bowl barrow.

Identification Images (2)

Most Recent Monitoring

None Recorded

Monument Types

Description

The barrow lies at a distance of approximately 20 metres from the eastern entrance of the hill fort. The central pit indicates that it has been dug into in the past, though it is not known when or by whom. There is a possibility that this depression is not due to having been dug in the past, but to the collapse of a central burial cist - a chamber built either of stone or timber. This barrow has a commanding view over the Aylesbury Vale and would likewise be highly visible from within the Vale.

This is barrow number 2 in Dyer's 1959 study of Chiltern's barrows [2].

The mound is positioned directly in front of the entrance of the hillfort, the hill fort almost certainly being a later feature. It does not seem, however, to have suffered from this positioning, and does not appear to show any erosion that might be expected from being in the path of a principal route into the fort. There could be a number of reasons for this:

1. Wainwright [3] has suggested that the main access route into the fort (152795) slanted up the north side of the hillfort from the west and thus missed the mound.
2. The mound was respected by the various phases of hillfort inhabitants and avoided when using the trackway.
3. The mound has been eroded and reconstructed with no records of this reconstruction surviving.
The significance of the barrows at Ivinghoe Beacon is increased by their proximity to each other, and their proximity to other earthworks and monuments in the vicinity such as the hillfort (which has Bronze Age occupation evidence). There is also some tentative geophysical evidence [4] for an earlier monument, possibly a Neolithic cursus, within the hillfort area.

(G Marshall)

Brief Description of Round Barrow Cemeteries.

Round barrows (of which a bowl barrow is one type) date to the Bronze Age (2000-700B.C.).They usually comprise of fairly closely spaced groups of up to 30 barrows. The construction is that of rubble or earth being piled up to cover single or multiple burials. In the case of the bowl barrow type, the mound material was principally obtained by digging a circular ditch and heaping the spoil in the centre to cover the burial. The surrounding ditches often silt up over time, but are usually visible as faint depression or as a crop mark.Most cemeteries developed over a considerable period of time, often many centuries They were also often re-used for secondary burials as in the case of Anglo-Saxon burials. They exhibit considerable diversity of burial rite, plan and form, frequently including several different types of round barrow. Occasionally earlier forms of long barrow are associated with round barrow cemeteries. Wherever large scale excavation has been undertaken beyond barrows, contemporary and/or later "flat" burials have been found. This should be taken into consideration when assessing how best to manage the overall barrow cemetery landscape.
Round barrow cemeteries occur across most of lowland Britain, with a marked concentration in Wessex and in some cases they cluster around other monuments such as henges.

(M Solik)

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None Recorded

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