Winterbourne Poor Lot
Winterbourne Poor Lot is a plot of land straddling the A35 main road near Winterbourne Abbas in Dorset containing forty-four Bronze Age burial mounds of varying types and sizes. The site is in the care of English Heritage.
The barrows on Winterbourne Poor Lot form a Bronze Age cemetery, one of one of several in the area: this part of Dorset has for some reason the highest density of Bronze Age barrows anywhere in the world. The barrows at Winterbourne are round barrows of a pattern typical of the Late Neolithic or Early Bronze Age, in this case dating from about 1500 BC.
Shape and evolution
The mounds much eroded in the three and half millennia since they were first thrown up and there is little clue as to how they looked when first thrown up. However here can be found examples of all four of the typal Bronze Age types: the steep-sided 'bowl' type; the 'bell' type (where the mound is separated from a surrounding ditch by a narrow platform), the flatter 'disc' type with a wider ditch; and the 'pond' barrow (a rarer type, hollow in the middle and surrounded by a bank.[1]
Some are in groups of two or three, perhaps suggesting family relationships. The largest barrow is a bowl barrow, at the centre of the group: it has a diameter of 115 feet and is 8 feet high. To the west of this is a large group comprising one disc barrow and seven bowl barrows.
Few of the barrows have been excavated so their contents and associated burial practices are unknown.
Outside links
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("Wikimedia Commons" has material about Poor Lot Barrows) |
- Location:
- Location map: 50°42’52"N, 2°35’3"W
- Streetmap: SY588907
- Winterbourne Poor Lot Barrows