Tumulus (destroyed): OS Grid Reference – TQ 222 709
Archaeology & History
It seems that a great number of prehistoric remains used to exist in and around the Wimbledon Common area. This one is mentioned only briefly in Thomas Stackhouse’s (1833) rare work on early British remains, where he wrote:
“Near an old single-trenched Camp at the South West comer of Wimbledon Common, is a very small flat Barrow cut into the form of a cross: I don’t know that it has been noticed by any writer.”
The “single-trenched Camp” he described is today known as Caesar’s Camp hillfort. By the time the Wimbledon historian William Bartlett (1865) came to write his survey, the site had been destroyed. In Mr Johnson’s (1903) survey, he seems to confuse this site with the large barrow cemetery that used to exist on the northern edges of Wimbledon Common described by William Stukeley and others.
(the grid-reference to this site is an approximation).
References:
- Bartlett, William A., The History and Antiquities of Wimbledon, Surrey, J. & S. Richards: Wimbledon 1865.
- Johnson, Walter, Neolithic Man in North-East Surrey, Elliot Stock: London 1903.
- Stackhouse, Thomas, Two Lectures on the Remains of Ancient Pagan Britain, privately printed: London 1833.
© Paul Bennett, The Northern Antiquarian