Monument record MDO43286 - Keynston Down

<RCHME 1972>: Five barrows survive in the N.W. of the parish, on the S. and S.E. of Buzbury Rings (16). There are records of three other barrows 'on Keyneston Down', excavated in 1846, but these almost certainly lay in Tarrant Launceston or Tarrant Monkton, for they appear to have been not more than 300 yds. from the Romano-British settlement on Blandford Race Down. One of these three barrows yielded a primary cremation with fragments of 'a coarse urn' in a cist, and a secondary cremation of a child in a two-handled vase, together with a piece of dark thick glass; a fragment of samian ware found at the side of the barrow, where the ground appeared to have been anciently disturbed, suggests that the secondary burial was Romano-British (C.T.D., Pt. 2, No. 6; Pt. 3, note on p. 76). A barrow near by yielded 'fragments of British Pottery' with ashes and charcoal, in a cist 8 ft. deep and 3 ft. in diameter (C.T.D., Pt. 2, No. 7). The third barrow yielded three cremations, probably primary, two cremations in upright urns, probably secondary, and one other, probably secondary, in an inverted urn; all were in separate cists, two of which were connected by a circular hole (C.T.D., Pt. 2, No. 8). A further barrow, perhaps in Tarrant Keyneston or Tarrant Rawston, was opened by J. H. Austen in 1840 and yielded a bowl-shaped urn with two lugs pierced perpendicularly (C.T.D., Pt. 2, No. 30). <1>

<1> Garrow, D and Cooper, A, 2021, Grave Goods Project dataset, 72983 (Machine readable data file). SDO17407.

Record last edited

Nov 22 2021 6:57PM