The Wiltshire Long Barrow Gazetteer

About this map

Interactive gazetteer of Wiltshire Neolithic long barrows from open HER extracts and Historic England scheduling polygons, plus Tim Daw’s modern All Cannings long barrow. Terrain is a county-wide EA Composite DTM hillshade at ~20 m; desktop zoom shows 1 m chips.

129 barrows 100 HER certain · 29 possible 65 NHLE-matched 86 with long-axis bearing shown Avebury / Pewsey: 27, North Wiltshire chalk: 16, South Wiltshire / Chase fringe: 8, Stonehenge / Salisbury Plain: 51, Wiltshire chalk: 27

Gold = HER certain · grey = possible. Circle markers: gold = HER certain, grey = possible, teal = modern. Rim arrows mark undirected long-axis bearings from north (0–180°), human-checked where shown. Gold outline = ceremonial Wiltshire (UA + Swindon).
LiDAR: County backdrop: EA Composite DTM ~20 m (all devices). Per-barrow 1 m chips: desktop map zoom ≳14, and in the detail strip when a barrow is selected.

Rose diagram of 86 Wiltshire long-barrow long axes, drawn both ways, with flat-horizon sunrise lines for midsummer, equinox and midwinter

Do they face the sun?

No — not as a shared design, and not as folklore likes. They do not all run along the ridges either. The eighty-six axes we could trust mostly spread, with only a gentle east–west smear and no spike at midsummer or midwinter.

Short note on the bearings · dashed lines on the rose are sunrise on a flat horizon (drawn for scale, not a finding)

Long axis

Map arrows are undirected long-axis bearings from north (0–180°), human-checked where shown. They are not solar alignments or façade directions.

Typology

Chambered, earthen, and hybrid traits form a spectrum — this map does not force a binary Cotswold–Severn vs earthen class on markers or filters. See each site’s Notes for plain-language typology. All Cannings is a modern (2014–) long barrow, not a Neolithic HER site.

Sources (v1 seed)

Wiltshire HER certain/possible points — Zenodo 10.5281/zenodo.11005373 (Wheatley recreation; underlying Wiltshire HER).
Named Avebury / Stonehenge HER list — Kutty 2024 Zenodo 10.5281/zenodo.10989406 (compiled from HER via Heritage Gateway).
Historic England NHLE Scheduled Monuments (OGL) — footprint + List Entry via ArcGIS FeatureServer.
Cotswold–Severn typology: Corcoran 1969; Darvill 2004 Long Barrows of the Cotswolds; Crawford 1925; site reports (Piggott & Atkinson; Whittle; Thurnam).
Catalogue literature: Ashbee; Field 2006; Kinnes 1992; Roberts et al. IA 47; McOmish et al. 2002 (SPTA).
EA LiDAR Composite DTM — OGL; county backdrop ~20 m (all devices); per-barrow 1 m hillshade chips (~380 m) on desktop zoom ≥14 and in the detail strip.

Known limits

Many HER rows lack published names; display falls back to HER / parish number.
Long-axis bearings are human-checked where shown; sites without a clear axis appear as plain circles.
Length/width from scheduling polygons are approximate (often oversize vs mound).
Not a complete county inventory of every ploughed / cropmark candidate.

Licence / sources

Compilation © Tim Daw / sarsen.org · CC BY-SA 4.0. NHLE © Historic England / OGL. EA LiDAR © Environment Agency / OGL. Ceremonial county boundary © Office for National Statistics / OGL. Zenodo Wheatley recreation 10.5281/zenodo.11005373 CC BY 4.0 (underlying Wiltshire HER). Zenodo Kutty 2024 10.5281/zenodo.10989406 CC BY 4.0 (compiled from HER via Heritage Gateway). Research gazetteer; not official HER; no land access implied.