Forty-four Bronze Age burial mounds scattered either side of the A35 near Winterbourne Abbas, some barely a bump in the field
Open accessfree to visit at any reasonable time
Earthworks onlybanks, ditches and platforms — read the ground, not walls
These fields west of Winterbourne Abbas sit in a stretch of Dorset where Bronze Age barrows are packed more densely than anywhere else in Britain, and forty-four of them survive together here, strung along both sides of the A35. The mounds take a handful of different forms — steep bowl barrows and flatter bell barrows are the most familiar, but there are also disc barrows, barely a mound at all, just a low rise ringed by a wide flat platform, and pond barrows, hollows sunk into the ground rather than built up. They date from around 1500 BC, and because so few have ever been excavated, who is buried in most of them, and how, remains unknown. A stretch of the Jubilee Trail crosses open farmland to reach the barrows; the small standing-stone circle of the Nine Stones is a couple of kilometres east along the same road.
