35 West Tump. West Tump Long Barrow [Map]

This barrow is to be found in the middle of Buckholt Wood, in the parish of Brimpsfield, about one and a half miles south-west of Birdlip. I discovered it accidentally in July, 1880, and in the following autumn thoroughly examined it. The direction of the barrow is south-east and north-west, the well-developed "horns" being at the south end. Its length is 149 feet, greatest width 76 feet, and greatest height ten feet three inches. A well-built dry wall surrounds the whole mound, faced only on the outer side. At the south-east end, between the "horns," the walls attain a height of three feet six inches. The "horns" are of equal size, and in the centre of the concavity between them are two upright stones, forming, as it were, a doorway, but this proved to be a deception, as there was no passage or chamber at this end. Four skeletons were found lying outside the circumscribing wall and close to it. The principal chamber was discovered at a distance of eighty-two feet from the southern "horn." Here there was a passage through the wall two feet wide. In breaking through the rubble of the opening we found two pieces of British pottery and a very perfect leaf-shaped arrow-head. A passage, three feet wide and seven feet long, led to the main chamber or trench; this passage was filled with rubble and bones in a very disorderly and confused state. The chamber was excavated below the original surface of the ground, beginning gradually to decline until it reached a depth of fifteen inches. We discovered the remains of upwards of twenty skeletons; the last one we found was at the end of the chamber, 24 feet from the outside wall; here were five flat stones, arranged in the shape of a semicircle, and on these was deposited in a contracted form the skeleton of, probably, a young female, with the remains of a baby in close proximity. Professor Rolleston (whose valuable assistance I was privileged to have during the excavation) was of opinion that the barrow was erected in honour of this Cotteswold Chieftainess. All the skulls found were of the dolicho-cephalic type.

The following letter from Professor Rolleston was, I believe, the last he wrote on any archaeological subject, and as it is of much interest to all antiquaries, I reproduce it in full, though it appeared with my Paper on this subject in the Proceedings of the Gloucestershire Archaeological Society:—

"Hotel de Londres, Genoa, January 17th, 1881.

"My dear Mr. Witts (age 36), — As I shall not be able to be present at the meeting at Cheltenham, before which the discoveries you have made at the Cranham Long Barrow will be brought, I should like to put on paper some of the larger points which my opportunities for seeing the barrow have impressed upon me. I am very sorry not to be present at your meeting, but, per contra, I am very glad to have seen so much of the explorations as by your kindness I did see; I regret also not to have been able to give a detailed account of the objects of interest, or at least of the bones found in the barrow; but, per contra again, the bones have been preserved and properly cared for, and having lasted to tell their own tale for some thousands (I do not say how many as yet) of years, they will well last a few more months now that they have been thus looked to. The first great point which your "West Tump" Barrow presents to my view, at least in the distant perspective into which my temporary exile puts me, is its freedom from any ambiguity or question as to its age. There is no room whatever for supposing that the tumulus itself is of any but a very early prehistoric age, or that the human bones which it contained could have belonged to men of the times of Cromwell, of Henry VI, of Henry IV, or to any metal-weaponed warriors, whether Plantagenet, Saxon, Roman, or British. How is this to be proved? The absence of any scrap of metal is, it may be said, only a negative argument towards the positive conclusion that the "West Tump" is a prehistoric tump. I should answer to this, that there is no cubical mass belonging to a metallic period and of equal bulk to this one, in which many scraps of metal could not be found. Notably in burial-grounds cast-off pans, as well as shards of pottery, are always to be found. I was struck, indeed, with the emphasis laid in a letter published recently in the "Times," as to the neglected state of a London cemetery, upon the shabby appearance presented by the flotsam and jetsam, into which metallic articles entered largely. But there is a much stronger argument for its prehistoric character than this, and it lies in the peculiar shape and conformation of the tump. The "West Tump" is a "horned cairn," and horned cairns are found all over Great Britain, from Caithness in the extreme north of Scotland, to the Peninsular of Gower in the extreme west of Wales. Now the peculiarities of a "horned cairn" are such, that it is impossible to imagine that they do not indicate to us that one race of men, and one only, must have combined them as they are combined. But we have no record of Great Britain having ever been so occupied by one single race in historic times; hence this tumulus is prehistoric.— Q.E.D. Think further of the distance and difficulty of intercommunication which even now separates Caithness from Cheltenham, and think what is implied in the view, that the same race of men must have spread from one spot to the other. There is yet another consideration which tells in favour of the prehistoric character of these tumps, and of their being prehistoric in a sense in which no other raised burial-place can claim to be. Their conformation appears to me to be modelled upon that of a limestone promontory burrowed into by water, and so hollowed into the caves which were the first dwelling-places of Troglodytic men. The houses of the dead have in many places and in all ages been modelled after the dwelling-places of the living, and I think the "idea" of the "horned cairns" is taken from that of a cave-dwelling in a sinuously eaten-out limestone promontory, such as you may see many of in South Wales. It was, indeed, whilst working out the rubble filling up one of those caves, just as you worked out the rubble in the "West Tump," that I came at once see the likeness. This likeness, I should add, anybody else may see who will compare your plans of the "West Tump with a ground plan of one of these caverns. By saying, as I did for the first time in public, at the meeting of the Britain Association at Swansea, last autumn, that the "idea" of the horned cairn was to be found in a cave-containing headland, I mean that the one structure has been made after the pattern of the other; just as the "idea" of a Gothic cathedral is to be found in an avenue of trees; or the "idea" of a Saxon urn, with its equatorial angularity and Vandyked pattern, is to be found in the appearance which holly-leaf presents when held by its stalk with the under surface towards the spectator. The bones from the "West Tump" are like all bones from similar barrows which have been through my hands, and in the following points:— They belonged to a short-statured but long-headed race of men, who were, if we may judge at all from what we see of living men of the same osteological character, darkish in complexion and hair. I have seen many such in this part of the world, being, as it is, a part of the world where pristine races are likely to survive, "the two voices, one of the sea, one of the mountains," favouring the chances which feebler folk have of escaping extirpation at the hands of stronger. But such men and such women may be found in many parts of even the most Saxonized and Danicized counties of England, and notably in Gloucestershire, which is such a county. I am perfectly certain that a sufficiently extensive set of bones from any real "horned cairn" would be distinguishable from any equally numerous and fairly selected, or similarly selected set of bones, from any other variety of interment in Great Britain, from those of the bronze period down to those of yesterday inclusive. Irrespective of any manganese or black fungus markings or discolorations, you will find peculiarities specified by me else (e.g. in "British Barrows," in my Paper on "The People of the Long Barrow Period," and on the tickets sent to Cheltenham with the "West Tump" skulls) in a collection of cranial and other bones from a Long Barrow, which you will either not find at all or find in very much smaller proportion per cent. in a collection from any other source. This statement, if true, is of great importance, both as regards the age of these interments and as regards the variability of our own species. I shall be glad to have the opportunity of showing its truth by a statistical examination of this particular set of Long Barrow bones when I return to England. Lastly, the broken state of many of the skeletons has been explained by some writers as being indicative of human sacrifices, &c. I think those persons who exposed themselves to constantly recurring avalanches of stones in the "West Tump" excavations, or exsaxations, will allow that these avalanches are a vera ac sufficiens causa for that broken state of the bones, and that theory of successive interments which is absolutely necessary for explaining the number of the bodies, will also account for the comminution which so many of them have suffered.

"With very kind regards, I am yours very truly,

"G. Rolleston."

"P.S.— Please have this printed with your Paper."

See "Proceedings Bristol and Glou. Archae. Soc.," vol. V, p201.