Monument record MDO47808 - Bronze Age barrows, Keyneston Down, Tarrant Keyneston

Three Bronze Age barrows with primary cremations were excavated on Keyneston Down in 1846. One of the barrows contained a secondary Roman cremation. The exact location of the barrows is not known.

Three barrows on Keyneston Down', excavated in 1846 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 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.

A barrow near by yielded 'fragments of British Pottery' with ashes and charcoal, in a cist 8 ft. deep and 3 ft in diameter The third barrow yielded three cremations, probably secondary, and one other, probably primary, two cremations in upright urns, probably secondary, in an inverted urn; all were in separate cists, two of which were connected by a circular hole 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.

A globular urn (Calkin's type II) from a barrow on Keyneston Down is in the Durden Collection at the B.M. (Durden Catalogue, 18 Nos. 22, 23). <1>

<1> Royal Commission on Historical Monuments (England), 1972, An Inventory of Historical Monuments in the County of Dorset, Volume IV (North), 104-105 (Monograph). SDO99.

<1.1> Warne, C, 1866, The Celtic Tumuli of Dorset (1866), 76 (Monograph). SWX8166.

<1.2> Abercromby, J, 1912, A Study of the Bronze Age Pottery of Great Britain and Ireland, 401 (Monograph). SDO10121.

<2> National Record of the Historic Environment, 209400 (Digital archive). SDO14739.

Record last edited

Feb 23 2024 1:36PM