Dorset Barrow

 "My" Dorset Barrow was on Candord Heath, close to Poole. It was on the edge of a gravel cliff that extends from Wimborne, along the south coast to St Catherines Hill, north of Christchurch.

When I, and the diggers I was working with, were excavating the barrow, I camped in my tent alongside it to make sure that the boys that hollered in the valley below during the day, did'nt trample my beatifully cut section across the barrow during the moonlit nights.

Aa I think I may have said, the barrow was a round mound right at the edge of a low cliff edge. At a distance from the mound was a gravel bank around it, and beyond that a ditch with a sharply cut base, "v" shaped.

The mound was made up of cut turves from the surrounding area that may have been stacked against a post that slotted into a post hole that was found at the centre of the barrow.

There was enough carbon in the posthole to date the barrow to 1000BC.

Someone had spent a long time in prehistory sitting on the mound and knapping flints. There was a huge spread of struck fkakes on top of the barrow, but the quality of the flint and the knapping make it seem unlikely that any useful tools were created by the effort.

Underneath the barrow though was another story.

Here, a layer, not very deep, of white sand contained a small group of blades and cores from an early peeiod of prehistory, the upper palaeolithic. 

I had dug at the mesolithic site on Hengistbury Head. There the blades knapped from flint were tiny, and the cores from which they were struck, equally small.

Here the long skillfully struck blades were beautidul, and i later found that they date to between 40,000 and 20,000 years ago when the weather was a bit chilly.

To find a trapped ground surface underneath the barrow like this was quite extraordinary. These things are usually found in caves.

At the end of the excavation every last drop of soil had been removed from the surface at the edge of the cliff. All that was left was the circular ditch and the post hole in the centre of it.

When I left the site for the last time I had a tremendous feeling of loss, that I had destroyed something that had meant something to somebody thousands of years ago. 

It had been excavated to prevent it from being used by bikers as a launch place for off road dirt track riding.

It changed something inside me for ever.

Jeffery Nicholls


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