palimpsest: Bartlow Hills

A landscape palimpsest worthy of the name is at Bartlow in Cambridgeshire, near to the northern Essex border. Here, the Victorians drove a railway line through a Roman burial ground laid out in the first century AD. The railway itself disappeared in the 1960s, not having anywhere near the longevity therefore of three of the Roman mounds, the central one (at 13 metres) the largest of its kind in northern Europe.

Victorian railway tunnel cutting into Mound 5 at Bartlow Hills

Whatever possessed the Victorians to think that this was a good spot for a piece of transport infrastructure? Not long before the railway arrived the mounds had been excavated, revealing a treasury of finds: containers of cremated remains, lodged within wooden chests that also included vessels of food and drink, flowers, box leaves, incense and traces of blood, wine and milk mixed with honey. The finds were taken to Easton Lodge in Essex, the home of the Maynard family, but the fire of 1847 that destroyed the Elizabethan mansion at Easton also destroyed the majority of the artefacts (though some examples still survive at Saffron Walden Museum).

Mounds 4 and 7 at Bartlow Hills

Perhaps the removal of the treasures inclined the railway company to think there was no harm in driving a train track and tunnel through this most ancient of sites. There were originally eight mounds in total, and traces of a few more survive on private land adjacent to the three that still stand today. These three are now held in guardianship by Cambridgeshire County Council, meaning that the mounds are fully accessible for public visiting. It is well worth climbing the stairs on the largest of them, to take in the view from the top.

The footpath leading to the mounds begins in the churchyard of Bartlow church, itself well worth a visit because of the remnants of its elaborate wall paintings. Three of these survive too, details of late 14^th-century decorative paintings depicting St George’s dragon, the weighing of souls by St Michael, and the bearded face of St Christopher. The church is one of only two round-towered churches in Cambridgeshire, and it is said that King Cnut ordered it to be built after the Battle of Assandun, when the Danes were triumphant over the English army of Edmund Ironside. (Sadly there is no evidence to support this theory, and the exact location of the Battle of Assandun remains unknown.)