Pond barrow 50m north of A344 west of The Cursus

Listed on the National Heritage List for England. Search over 400,000 listed places

Overview

Heritage Category:: Scheduled Monument
List Entry Number:: 1010895
Date first listed:: 10-Jun-1952

The Missing Pieces Project

Share your view of unique places.

Add your contribution

Location

Location of this list entry and nearby places that are also listed. Use our map search to find more listed places.

This map is for quick reference purposes only and may not be to scale.

What is the National Heritage List for England?

The National Heritage List for England is a unique register of our country's most significant historic buildings and sites. The places on the list are protected by law and most are not open to the public.

The list includes:

🏠 Buildings
🏰 Scheduled monuments
🌳 Parks and gardens
⚔️ Battlefields
⚓ Shipwrecks

Find out more about listing

Historic England Archive

Search over 1 million photographs and drawings from the 1850s to the present day using our images archive.

Find Photos

Official list entry

Heritage Category:: Scheduled Monument
List Entry Number:: 1010895
Date first listed:: 10-Jun-1952
Date of most recent amendment:: 20-Jun-1995

Location

The building or site itself may lie within the boundary of more than one authority.

District:: Wiltshire (Unitary Authority)
Parish:: Winterbourne Stoke
National Grid Reference:: SU 10435 42868

Reasons for Designation

A small number of areas in southern England appear to have acted as foci for ceremonial and ritual activity during the Neolithic and Bronze Age periods. Two of the best known and the earliest recognised areas are around Avebury and Stonehenge, now jointly designated as a World Heritage Site. The area of chalk downland which surrounds Stonehenge contains one of the densest and most varied groups of Neolithic and Bronze Age field monuments in Britain. Included within the area are Stonehenge itself, the Stonehenge cursus, the Durrington Walls henge, and a variety of burial monuments, many grouped into cemeteries. The area has been the subject of archaeological research since the 18th century when Stukeley recorded many of the monuments and partially excavated a number of the burial mounds. More recently, the collection of artefacts from the surfaces of ploughed fields has supplemented the evidence for ritual and burial by revealing the intensity of contemporary settlement and land-use. In view of the importance of the area, all ceremonial and sepulchral monuments of this period which retain significant archaeological remains are identified as nationally important.

Pond barrows are ceremonial or funerary monuments of the Early to Middle Bronze Age, with most examples dating to between 1500 and 1000 BC. The term `barrow' is something of a misnomer as, rather than a mound, they were constructed as regular circular depressions with an embanked rim and occasionally an outer ditch or entrance through the bank. They occur either in isolation or within round barrow cemeteries. Pond barrows are the rarest form of round barrow with about 60 examples recorded nationally, and a distribution largely confined to Wiltshire and Dorset, many of which are in the Stonehenge area. As few examples have been excavated, they have a particularly high value for future study. Due to their rarity, all identified pond barrows will normally be considered to be of national importance. Despite having been levelled by cultivation, the pond barrow 50m north of the A344 on Winterbourne Stoke Down survives in the form of buried features and will contain archaeological remains and environmental evidence relating to the monument and the landscape in which it was constructed.

Details

The monument includes a levelled pond barrow located 50m north of the A344, west of The Cursus on a gentle south facing slope on Winterbourne Stoke Down. The barrow is now difficult to identify on the ground but the surrounding outer bank of the pond is visible as a circular chalk spread on aerial photographs from which the overall diameter is calculated to be 20m.

MAP EXTRACT The site of the monument is shown on the attached map extract. It includes a 2 metre boundary around the archaeological features, considered to be essential for the monument's support and preservation.

Legacy

The contents of this record have been generated from a legacy data system.

Legacy System number:: 10467
Legacy System:: RSM

Sources

Other

E/RC8 CM 145, Cambridge University Collection,

Legal

This monument is scheduled under the Ancient Monuments and Archaeological Areas Act 1979 as amended as it appears to the Secretary of State to be of national importance. This entry is a copy, the original is held by the Department for Culture, Media and Sport.