Burial

Bronze-age peoples cremated their dead.  In the early Bronze Age round barrows started to be used for burial.  Around Chobham, Bronze Age type tumuli/round barrows are widespread - notably near Sunningdale, Longcross and West End - see map.  

The photograph shows the group of four barrows at West End on Brentmoor Heath as they appeared in the 1930s.  They have appropriate Early Bronze Age features ^{9 p130}.   Trenches have been dug across the southern part of the two end barrows but nothing found ⁽¹⁾. 

The barrow just inside the Chobham parish border near Sunningdale was destroyed during the development of the golf course. It contained 23 crude cremation urns plus 2 cremations without urns. Most were found on SW side. The urns varied considerably in design so is inferred that the barrow served a community over a long time span. The urn illustrated is 22cm high. It was filled with burnt bones and charcoal and contained a flint ‘strike-light’ ⁽²⁾.  You can see more photographs and read the report of the archaeologist who excavated this barrow by clicking on the link in the top of the left navigation margin of this page. 

Although no primary internment was found in this or other barrows, we cannot be sure that there never was.   Archaeology was not so advanced at the turn of the 19th C and in the acid soils of Surrey Heath bones and wooden coffins never survive.  When an Early Bronze Age round barrow was recently excavated in the Fens, a child was found buried in a pit at the centre and subsequently, up until the middle of the second millennium BC, for perhaps half a millennium, a series of cremation urns were inserted into the mound ¹¹.    So perhaps our barrows were constructed in the Early Bronze Age originally for a burial, evidence of which no longer survives, and subsequently used for inserting cremation urns?

Perhaps the cremations took place in the settlements, the ashes placed in a 'disposable' earthenware urn, carried to the ancestral barrow where a hole was dug in the side and the urn tipped in - often left upside down.  

The mounds at Barrowhills at Longcross ⁽⁴⁾ were stated by Grinsell to be natural: not man-made.  But that does not prevent them being used by ancient man as boundary points and ancestral cemeteries.  A bronze spear head was found at 'Barrowhills on Chertsey Common' ⁽⁵⁾ and is now in Guildford Museum.

The mound in the east of Chobham Common in Longcross Woods is a scheduled ancient monument ⁽³⁾.   

The Longcross Barrow - as surveyed by Chris Currie in 2002

It is a low mound about 30m in diameter with an encircling ditch.  Very little is known about this mound.  It is on a low ridge and its shape and size is very much in keeping with a Bronze-age barrow.  Its position is interesting; when Chobham Common was clear of trees, if standing at the earthworks in the Slade to the south - alongside the parish boundary; then you would see this tumuli immediately below the higher main barrow at Barrowhills.  If you then walked north, keeping the barrows in alignment, you would be defining the parish boundary.

The tumuli on the Maultway, on the western edge of the parish, was recorded ¹ but has long since disappeared; probably under the former Blackdown Barracks. 

By the later Bronze Age, cemeteries with cremated remains in pots or just scoops in the ground were in use. ^{10 p73}  In 1867, the Rev. C Kerry, curate of Puttenham donated to Charterhouse School broken Bronze Age cremation urns found in the 'moat field' at Chobham Park.  These are now in the Surrey Heath Museum.⁸