Horslip (Windmill Hill) Long Barrow, Avebury

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Horslip Long Barrow plan

Horslip (Windmill Hill) Long Barrow, Avebury

Sitting on the south‑east shoulder of Windmill Hill (grid ref. SU 086 070), 140 ft (43 m) above the Kennet valley, the Horslip long barrow commands the same chalk ridge that carries the famous Early‑Neolithic causewayed enclosure 400 m upslope. First sketched by William Stukeley in 1743, the mound had been badly ploughed when P. Ashbee and I. F. Smith completely excavated it in 1959 to rescue what remained. They revealed a single‑phase monument c. 46 m long, flanked by deep quarry ditches and resting on a buried turf that had already supported open grassland crops by about 3300 BC, according to land‑snail and pollen analyses.

Construction and layout

• Mound & berm – a chalk‐rubble Cairn with chalk‑block revetment sat on a c. 12 ft wide berm; only a skin of mound survived after centuries of plough‑levelling.
• Flanking ditches – V‑shaped, 3.5 m deep at the proximal end and shallower toward the east; primary fills were pure chalk weathering, sealing an antler pick dated 3240 ± 150 BC (BM‑180) that anchors construction in the early fourth millennium BC.
• Internal features – two arcs of large intersecting pits and two axial pits cut the chalk beneath the mound; their sequence shows organised quarrying for core material, not funerary chambers.

Artefacts and eco-facts

Significance

Horslip stands out because, unlike many Wessex Long Barrows, no primary burials or chambers were found; the builders invested labour in quarrying and piling chalk, perhaps as a territorial marker or ceremonial Earthwork rather than a funerary tomb. The antler‑pick radiocarbon age of c. 3240 BC makes it one of the earliest securely dated monuments in the Avebury landscape, contemporary with Windmill Hill’s ditch system. Its rich lithic scatter and Beaker sherds show that people revisited the mounded landmark over a millennium after construction, weaving new rites into an already ancient feature. Together, the structural evidence, organic tools and environmental data make Horslip a key reference for how Early Neolithic communities engineered, used and later reinterpreted long Barrows in the Kennet valley.