West Kennet Long Barrow
West Kennet Long Barrow near Avebury in Wiltshire is the finest Neolithic chambered long barrow in England, a burial monument approximately 100 metres long built around 3650 BC that was used for communal burial over several centuries before being sealed with massive sarsen boulders around 2500 BC. The barrow is freely accessible and the experience of entering the burial chambers cut into the chalk beneath the mound provides one of the most direct and most atmospheric encounters with the Neolithic world available in Britain. The burial chambers are arranged in two pairs off a central passage at the eastern end of the mound, each chamber constructed from massive upright sarsen stones with horizontal cap stones forming the roof. The chambers were used for the burial of many individuals over the centuries of use, the bones being rearranged and the space reused in a communal ancestral tradition quite different from individual burial. The remains of at least forty-six individuals were found during the excavation of the chambers in 1955 and 1956. The long barrow stands on the chalk ridge within sight of Silbury Hill and the Avebury monuments, part of the dense concentration of Neolithic and Bronze Age monuments that make the Avebury landscape the most significant prehistoric monument complex in Britain. The walk between West Kennet, Silbury Hill and Avebury, traversing the chalk downland between these extraordinary monuments, provides one of the finest prehistoric landscape experiences available in England.