Bartlow Hills is a

Roman Roman or Romans most often refers to: *Rome, the capital city of Italy *Ancient Rome, Roman civilization from 8th century BC to 5th century AD *Roman people, the people of ancient Rome *'' Epistle to the Romans'', shortened to ''Romans'', a lette ...

tumuli A tumulus (plural tumuli) is a mound of earth and stones raised over a grave or graves. Tumuli are also known as barrows, burial mounds or ''kurgans'', and may be found throughout much of the world. A cairn, which is a mound of stones built ...

cemetery in Bartlow,

Cambridgeshire Cambridgeshire (abbreviated Cambs.) is a county in the East of England, bordering Lincolnshire to the north, Norfolk to the north-east, Suffolk to the east, Essex and Hertfordshire to the south, and Bedfordshire and Northamptonshire to the ...

, England. The site was in

Essex Essex () is a county in the East of England. One of the home counties, it borders Suffolk and Cambridgeshire to the north, the North Sea to the east, Hertfordshire to the west, Kent across the estuary of the River Thames to the south, and Grea ...

until a boundary alteration in 1990. Four of the original seven tumuli or barrows remain; the largest three are accessible to the public, the northernmost and smallest is on private property and is not easily visible. The remnants of two more are visible as low mounds west of the three largest barrows. The tallest barrow is high, and is the largest Roman barrow north of the

Alps The Alps () ; german: Alpen ; it, Alpi ; rm, Alps ; sl, Alpe . are the highest and most extensive mountain range system that lies entirely in Europe, stretching approximately across seven Alpine countries (from west to east): France, Swi ...

. The barrows date from the 1st or 2nd centuries CE. Excavations were undertaken in the 19th century (chiefly in 1832–40), discovering remains of large wooden chests, decorated vessels in bronze, glass and pottery and an iron folding chair (most of which were lost in a fire at Easton Lodge in 1847). A small

Roman villa A Roman villa was typically a farmhouse or country house built in the Roman Republic and the Roman Empire, sometimes reaching extravagant proportions. Typology and distribution Pliny the Elder (23–79 AD) distinguished two kinds of villas n ...

, occupied until the late 4th century, was situated north of the mounds and was excavated in 1852. The site saw no further work until a

geophysical survey Geophysical survey is the systematic collection of geophysical data for spatial studies. Detection and analysis of the geophysical signals forms the core of Geophysical signal processing. The magnetic and gravitational fields emanating from the E ...

in 2006 and further excavations in 2007, but this work did not establish the location of the villa.

References

External links

2007 excavations at Bartlow Hills by the University of Reading

Bartlow Hills on megalithic.co.uk
* A picture showing Bartlow Hills during the construction of the railway in about 1864 is available o
this page
* A set of aerial photographs of Bartlow Hills by Bill Blake i
available on Flickr

Ashdon on british-history.ac.uk
with information on Barlow Hills

Bibliography

* Eckardt, H., Brewer, P., Hay, S. and Poppy, S. (2009) Roman barrows and their landscape context: a GIS case study at Bartlow, Cambridgeshire. Britannia, 40 (1). pp. 65–98. ISSN 1753-535

* Eckardt, H., Clarke, A. S., Hay, S., Macaulay, S., Ryan, P., Thornley, D. M. and Timby, J. (2009) The Bartlow Hills in context: report on recent excavations. Proceedings of the Cambridge Antiquarian Society, XCVIII. pp. 47–64

* Astin, T., Eckardt, H. and Hay, S. (2007) Resistivity imaging survey of the Roman barrows at Bartlow, Cambridgeshire, UK. Archaeological Prospection, 14 (1). pp. 24–37. ISSN 1075-219

* The 19th century excavations were published in the journal Archaeologia in the years 1834, 1836, 1840, and 1842. Archaeological sites in Cambridgeshire {{Cambridgeshire-geo-stub