Name: No-one built these for 5,000 years… until now.
Uploaded: 2026-01-12T16:54:41.000Z
Duration: 6 min 4 s
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Across Western Europe, if you know what to look for, you can find long barrows, bumps in the landscape, a few dozen metres long, built up of earth and stone or timber thousands of years ago.

Some of them contain the bones of the dead, so they might have been tombs or churches or.

They're prehistoric in the very literal sense.

So if you ask three archaeologists what long barrows were used for, you'll probably get four different opinions.

there's still tens of thousands of them across Europe, often hidden into the landscape.

It was finished for the winter solstice of 2020.

In terms of physical construction, it was probably little more than 12 months.

My friend Tim Dore, who was the steward of Stonehenge for a long time, had the idea to revive longbarrows and built the first new one in Wiltshire on his farm.

And then the stonemasons were looking for another farmer who wanted to host this kind of project.

When I was a little boy, we used to have holidays in Anglesey, and

some of the original barrows were the bottom of the beach that we were staying by.

So I knew exactly what it was instantly and how beautiful it would be.

This is one of a very small number of long barrows that have been constructed in this millennium.

And while there aren't bones inside, this is what's called a columbarium.

There are niches for the ashes of the dead.

I've been told several times that I don't need to whisper in here, but

I was taught there should be respect dead by keeping quiet.

As a tomb, the main chamber here has been used as a theater.

It's been used for celebrations of lives that have passed.

There is capacity for a hundred people in this main chamber, a hundred living people, that is.

And someone had to calculate that the Neolithic one stood for five and a half thousand years, but

they didn't have concrete and rebar and the fire exit, which, in order to satisfy insurers, is in this structure in a couple of places, just because the scale is what it is.

Everything had to be tested a lot in terms of engineering specifications to be completely happy that it would last a very long time.

Accessibility laws are very important on the original barrows.

If you visit them, you'll have to crawl into them.

There'll be no lighting and it's a lovely experience and sort of high five with people thousands of years ago, but

This place was constructed by stonemasons, and

while they had modern planning tools and computerized design, the stones were placed by hand.

And yes, like a lot of prehistoric long barrows, the sun lines up with the entrance and exit on the summer solstice.

So I think a lot of people assume that getting the alignments of a monument like this, or indeed Stonehenge, would involve complex calculations and sharp pencils and computing power.

But in fact, you can do it just as easily by getting up at the right time with some sticks.

And as long as it's not cloudy, the shadows line up.

Humanity's invented a lot of things since history began, including capitalism.

It is not cheap to build and maintain a long barrow.

These niches will all fill up over time, but

just like in most columbariums around the world, they the ashes stored here will not be stored forever.

It's very difficult to talk about this sensitively without running the risk of hurting people.

But the company called Sacred Stones run the open days and handle purchasing of niches.

And I'm looking after the landscape and the farming.

It involves a lot of materials and a lot of skilled labour to do this.

In order that the monument can still be here, it needs to be looked after, which means people need to be caring about it in centuries to come.

And under a system of capitalism, the people doing that work need to be paid.

There is a commercial transaction that exists around when people sadly die.

It's become very efficient, but it hasn't become very beautiful.

If we think about what happens at a contemporary crematorium, then you have quite a drive through experience timers on how long a ceremony can be.

You can buy sort of mass produced manufactured urns and things.

And here people are commissioning artists locally to take, say, some of the clay from this landscape and then make an earn, or commissioning a stained glass artist or someone who carves wood to do fretwork.

It could be one very small niche for a year, or it could be one very large niche for multiple members of one family for essentially a century.

The longest relationship that we can make, this 99 years.

Churchyard will not give you more than 99 years by law in the UK, they can extend and renew their relationship for another century if they want to, generation over generation.

But if not, if the niche is wanted by someone else and a century has gone by, then the ashes are respectfully scattered around here.

You have to take the whole process extremely seriously, because the people who you're helping are quite vulnerable.

It's quite a culturally sensitive project to revive something that was obviously sacred to another culture that we can't properly understand.

As you'll see details in here that relate to different original barrows around the country.

And I like to think that if a Neolithic farmer, and

they are the first farmers, were to visit this, they might not necessarily think we got it right, but

they would at least think that we were sympathetic and respectful.

A long barrow, like any memorial, isn't built for the dead.

It's built for the living, to provide a focus point, a space to remember and to reflect.

And here, that's not just about the recently deceased.

It's about those who were here millennia before.