Neolithic stone tombs could be used to store ashes for the first time in 4,000 years

[Blackleaf]

Prehistoric stone tombs used to store the ashes of loved ones are being built in Britain for the first time in thousands of years.

The ancient resting places could help to tackle the problem of a lack of burial space.

Until now, Neolithic earth mounds built over the dead, known as long barrows, had not been used since around 2,000 BC.

However, a company is about to open a barrow near St Neots, Cambridgeshire, after the idea proved surprisingly popular among people looking for a final resting place.

Return of the burial mound: Neolithic stone tombs could be used in the UK to store ashes for the first time in 4,000 years

The earth mounds, built over the dead, have not been used since 2,000BC
The prehistoric stone tombs were used to store the ashes of loved ones
A Cambridgeshire company is bringing back the ancient tombs after the idea proved surprisingly popular with people seeking a final resting place

By Libby Plummer For Mailonline
25 October 2016

Prehistoric stone tombs used to store the ashes of loved ones are being built in Britain for the first time in thousands of years.

The ancient resting places could help to tackle the problem of a lack of burial space.

Until now, Neolithic earth mounds built over the dead, known as long barrows, had not been used since around 2,000 BC.

The limestone frame covered in soil and grass was entirely handmade by a team of four stonemasons using traditional techniques over the course of five months

However, a company is about to open a barrow near St Neots, Cambridgeshire, after the idea proved surprisingly popular among people looking for a final resting place.

The limestone frame covered in soil and grass was entirely handmade by a team of four stonemasons using traditional techniques over the course of five months.

The project took more than 3,500 hours and in excess of 300 tons of Northamptonshire limestone to complete.

The end result is a large dune of earth with a burial space within.

The earth-covered barrow contains 400 niches for families to reserve at £2,000 ($2,442) to £5,000 ($6,106) a plot

Plots, or niches, line the walls and a central passageway bisects the circular chamber, which is illuminated by candles

Plots, or niches, line the walls and a central passageway bisects the circular chamber, which is illuminated by candles.

The limestone walls support a striking beehive-shaped corbelled roof above and on the outside. The insulating earth roof ensures that everything underneath is kept dry.

Stone seating has been built in the woodland surrounding the barrow.

Work starting on the new St Neots barrow in Cambridgeshire. In 2014, stonemason Tim Daw built the first barrow on British soil in 5,500 years

An image shows the base of the new tomb starting to take shape in St Neots, Cambridgeshire

The base of the new long barrow is being built up from the ground out of limestone

The limestone frame covered in soil and grass was entirely handmade by a team of four stonemasons using traditional techniques over the course of five months

Toby Angel of Sacred Stones is behind the scheme to build new long barrows

Sacred Stones, the Bedfordshire company behind the project, was inspired by associate and stonemason Tim Daw who built the first barrow on British soil in 5,500 years in 2014.

While Tim's was a labour of love, Sacred Stones views the project as the beginning of a successful business.

The firm will be selling 400 niches for between £1,950 ($2,381) and £7,000 ($8,549).

The niches come in three different sizes according to the number of urns it can fit.

A single niche measures 180 cubic inches, a double 210 and a large, with enough room for up to five urns, measures 350 cubic inches.

Toby Angel, managing director of the company, said: 'Our objective is that people will use these structures to celebrate life.

'What has struck me most is just how meaningful our barrows have become for people.

'They spend hours in there talking or simply admiring the craftsmanship. It's a beautiful place to lay someone to rest.

'Inside it's very calm and peaceful. The only light comes from the entrance or people can light candles.'

The barrow is being built in St Neots, Cambridgeshire

The earth-covered barrow contains 400 niches for families to reserve at £2,000 ($2,443) to £5000 ($6,103) a plot

Toby Angel of Sacred Stones (pictured left) is behind the new building boom. Neolithic barrows are being built again as burial mounds for modern Britons

He added: 'There is no common trend among the people who are interested. We have a variety of different ages and religions.

'People love the fact that our barrows are secular but they are free to practice whatever faith they like.

'My local vicar came to visit and absolutely loved it. She completely understands what we are doing.'

Mr Angel says the emergence of barrows could also provide an answer to the lack of burial space in the UK, which experts say could soon develop into a crisis.

Plots, or niches, line the walls and a central passageway bisects the circular chamber, which is illuminated by candles. The firm will be selling 400 niches for between £1,950 ($2,381) and £7,000($8,549)

In 2014 in Wiltshire, farmer Tim Daw built the first long barrow on British soil for 5,500 years, allowing families to place urns containing the ashes of their loved ones within it from £400 per niche

A recent survey revealed around 50 per cent of local authorities fear they have 20 years or less before they run out of room.

The cost of a niche is similar or in many cases even cheaper than a traditional burial, which on average runs to £3,800 ($4,641).

Mr Daw said the purchase becomes even more cost-efficient when you consider each niche has at least enough room for two urns.

Willow Row is located in a secluded area of countryside surrounded by woodland and fields, visitors have to walk about a third of a mile from the nearest car park.

Sacred Stones has had interest in its business from all over the world and is currently planning barrows in eight other British counties.

WHAT ARE LONG BARROWS?

Construction on West Kennet long barrow in Wiltshire was started around 3,600BC, about 400 years before construction started on Stonehenge

Long barrows were Neolithic burial chambers.

Earth mounds were built over the stone structures, which acted as collective tombs.

The ancient burial chambers have not been widely used in Britain since around 2,000 BC.

West Kennet long barrow


Read more: Return of the burial mound: Neolithic stone tombs could be used in the UK to store ashes for the first time in 4,000 years | Daily Mail Online
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[Danbones]

so now you get a parallel idea of what stonehenge actually looked like as the building it was

 

[Blackleaf]

so now you get a parallel idea of what stonehenge actually looked like as the building it was

Are you saying it was used as a burial chamber and had an earth mound over the top of it?

 

[lone wolf]

What's under it?

 

[Blackleaf]

What's under it?

Radar scanners find 17 sites under Stonehenge | Daily Mail Online

 

[Curious Cdn]

Very cool. I'd prefer go be buried in one 5000 years old, though ....

Oh, after I'm dead ...

 

[Tecumsehsbones]

You understand, I hope, that these people are in no way related to modern Britain. In fact, they are the enemies and victims of the successive waves of invaders who make up the (retarded) people of modern-day Britain.

 

[Curious Cdn]

You understand, I hope, that these people are in no way related to modern Britain. In fact, they are the enemies and victims of the successive waves of invaders who make up the (retarded) people of modern-day Britain.

Yes, the aboriginal people got driven out to places where they, in turn, could drive out some other aboriginal peoples.

No matter. My ashes will end up in an ancestral burial ground, here, surrounded by my ascendants and cousins.

This is my homeland.

 

[Tecumsehsbones]

Yes, the aboriginal people got driven out to places where they, in turn, could drive out some other aboriginal peoples.

No matter. My ashes will end up in an ancestral burial ground, here, surrounded by my ascendants and cousins.

This is my homeland.

Ahem! This is part of the reason he shoulda been President.

[youtube]64k03jLcyag[/youtube]

 

[Blackleaf]

QUENTIN LETTS: Soulless Britain and what this new Bronze Age style tomb can teach us about death (and life)

Tomb for human remains of 400 opens in Cambridgeshire this weekend
Visitors will be able to walk through dusty corridors and see memorials
Common in Bronze Age but none have been built for thousands of years

By Quentin Letts for the Daily Mail
27 October 2016

Neolithic man would understand. This weekend, near St Neots in Cambridgeshire, a brand new burial barrow will open for business — only the second to be built in this country for thousands of years.

Crafted out of stone to a low-slung, beehive design, the Willow Row barrow will have 400 candlelit alcoves, each with space for one or more urns of human remains.

The barrow, with its ceiling rough hewn from rounded stone and with its grassed-over roof, will likely have the atmosphere of a catacomb, and maybe the mustiness of a World War II air-raid shelter.

This weekend, near St Neots in Cambridgeshire, a brand new burial barrow will open for business — only the second to be built in this country for thousands of years

Visitors will be able to walk around its passages and central chamber, provided they are not too tall. They will be able to inhale the still air, run fingers over chiselled stones and commune with their dead. Is there, for those of us still with breath in our bodies, anything more humbling?

Barrows were common in the Middle Bronze Age. It is interesting, to say the least, if they are coming back into vogue. And that does seem to be the case.

Two years ago, the stonemasons behind the Willow Row barrow built a similar burial mound in Wiltshire. They did so on a hunch that this sort of retro burial chamber might not only solve the problem of 21st century graveyard shortages, but also meet a desire for something more emotionally satisfying — more spiritual — than is provided by non- church funerals.

The hunch was proved right. The Wiltshire barrow was astonishingly popular. You could almost say people were dying to get in there.

Who can blame them? Too many of today’s municipal crematoria are desperately soulless places. Often sited on the outskirts of a town, invariably with Sixties architecture and windswept car parks, they have slots of 20 minutes or so for each cremation.

Outside these production lines of body disposal you can see shivering huddles of black-clad mourners. From inside comes the electric warble of a perfunctory hymn, quite possibly played on a tape recorder, before another whimpering group is hustled towards the back exit, there to light fags and have a proper cry.

That’s your lot, folks. Press the buttons. Re-set the tape for I Did It My Way. It’s time for the next funeral party.

The staff who run such places do their best to be sympathetic, no doubt, but the system and its functional design is against them. How impersonal, how metallic this modern procedure can be.

It is as if officialdom has become deaf to the poetry of ceremonial. As if utilitarianism has replaced Christianity as our national creed. Some opinion formers and political leaders certainly seem grimly determined for that to happen.

Reaction to the Wiltshire barrow, which was so eagerly embraced by bereaved families, suggests the public want better.

There is something deep-rooted in human nature that cries out for a greater connection to our regiment of the dead.

Recent intellectual fashion has tried to dismiss this, arguing that life is no more than a biological function and that the moment of death is as utter as the cessation of an electric current.

The businessman behind the St Neots barrow, where a 99-year alcove occupancy for one urn will costnearly £2,000, is Toby Angel

For all the talk of atheist rationalism by the likes of Prof Richard Dawkins and his angry supporters, they have not crushed that innate yearning for a place where we can venerate, remember and perhaps try to pray.

As so often in life, the past has shown us the way. In this case, the past happens to be a burial practice that would have been known to spear-chucking, mammoth- dragging cave dwellers.

They may not have known Christ nor even — almost unimaginable to today’s youth — have had access to the internet, yet early humans had something to teach us.

The businessman behind the St Neots barrow, where a 99-year alcove occupancy for a single urn will cost just under £2,000, is Toby Angel. It’s not a bad surname for a man in his line of work.

Though he has described his Sacred Stones company as having an ethos ‘based on secular beliefs’, he says the barrows are ‘non-denominational, but full of faith’. This, he adds, ‘chimes’ with the people who have beaten a path to the door of his long, narrow, pre-historical-style burial chambers.

‘Chime’ is a good verb. It suggests a tingling resonance, something we feel as much as we hear. Such sensations defy the rationalism of the militant secularists.

Mr Angel observes that modern cremation services can ‘lack sincerity’ and are ‘hurried, impersonal and frankly unsatisfactory. Families seem to relinquish responsibility to the commercial devil that is box-ticking and prescribed process.’

Having seen the success of Tim Daw, the farmer and part-time Stonehenge steward who commissioned that first modern barrow in Wiltshire in 2014, Mr Angel decided there was a need for more.

You can find Bronze Age barrows in various rural parts of our British isles, often in woods or atop scarps where they would have been nearer to the heavens and the souls of the departed could have soared like hawks. Relations would revisit these barrows. They would sometimes hold revels there.

There was an ancient barrow near us when we lived on the cusp of the Cotswolds. On glum days, I would visit it and push my way under its 4ft-high tunnel mouth.

Once inside it was possible — at a crouch — to work your way along the snaking passageway, your nostrils assaulted by the smell of mud and of rotting leaves that had been blown inside.

I’d pause and reflect on the day the burial party had deposited the corpse, behind these same stones I was touching. It created a powerful bond with history.

Toby Angel reports that in his modern barrows the sound of the wind passing the passage opening can create a low-frequency hum which ‘imbues a meditative state’ in visitors.

When I used to visit that ancient barrow in Gloucestershire, I remember being able to hear the weather outside and feeling a sense of protection. There was something womb-like about the low structure. It was immensely reassuring.

Death is the great and necessary leveller. Today’s society — particularly its most successful members — forgets this. In this allegedly ‘post-Christian’ age, there has been an attempt to tidy away death, to make it invisible.

Those of us who still consider ourselves Christian, and proudly so, may be rather less terrified of it. In that St Neots barrow there will be no escaping the realisation that we are all going to die.

Britain is more shy of death than other countries. My beloved Uncle Christopher, who lived in Spain, is buried in a multi-tier, above-ground cemetery on a hillside above Santa Eulalia, Ibiza.

His coffin is visible through a pane of glass. Visiting that cemetery is deeply affecting. After doing so, I have come away determined to make more of my few years on earth.

One side of my mother’s family lived in Ireland and there is a family mausoleum, recently restored, in Co. Cavan, where you can observe the coffins of various 19th and 20th century relations.

Is this ghoulish? No. But it does make you think about your own mortality.

The same happens at church funerals. You have only to attend an Anglican burial conducted to the rites of the Book Of Common Prayer to be reminded — its 16th century language will lift goose-pimples on your neck — that ‘Man that is born of a woman hath but a short time to live’.

I attended such a funeral in rural Herefordshire two weeks ago. Our village elder, John Edwards, had died aged 86.

Neolithic barrows are being built again as burial mounds for modern Britons

John was a tiny ball of energy, a church warden for more than 50 years, chairman of the county council, a great man of the community and a good friend; such a tiny coffin he had, yet it bore so many memories.

I watched his grieving widow and children stand by the open grave, wind ruffling their hair, and was struck by the timelessness of grief.

Modern mankind has no more been able to escape it than was the grunting Neanderthal.

Later, I went and stood by John’s deep grave and threw some dirt on the coffin, as one does. Dust to dust, ashes to ashes, the priest had intoned.

John’s grave is just to the south-east of How Caple church, within yards of the path. We will pass it every Sunday on our way to worship.

Each time, perhaps, we will remember John, think of his long and useful life, and perhaps improve our own.

That, in large part, is the function of burial shrines, be they Christian graves or non-denominational barrows — to act as a commemoration of the past and as a comfort and caution to the living.

Atheists will harrumph that this is pointless, that we are mere atoms, soon to disappear.

I disagree. And whatever our fate, would it not be instructive for our princes and potentates, our billionaire business tycoons on their yachts in Monaco, our political posh boys, our celebrity posturers, to be reminded of the impermanence of mortal life?

If the Wiltshire and St Neots barrows mark a return to such awareness, it seems a most welcome return to a wiser past.

Read more: QUENTIN LETTS: Soulless Britain and what this new Bronze Age style tomb can teach us about death (and life) | Daily Mail Online
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You understand, I hope, that these people are in no way related to modern Britain.

Rubbish. Around three-quarters of Britons share a common ancestry with the hunter-gatherers who settled in Atlantic Europe during the Palaeolithic era, after the melting of the ice caps but before Britain became an island.

The people who built these Neolithic long barrows to bury their dead in were the ancestors of most Britons today.