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Summary

Part of a Scheduled Monument. A Bronze Age bowl barrow with a memorial stone to Civil War soldiers

Associated Legal Designations or Protected Status

• Scheduled Monument 1013245: TWO BOWL BARROWS: PART OF A BARROW CEMETERY ON WASH COMMON.

Other Statuses and Cross-References

• Berkshire SMR No. (pre 2000): 01046.03.000
  
• Primary Reference Number: 1301
  

Monument Type(s):

• BOWL BARROW (Bronze Age - 2350 BC to 701 BC)
• COMMEMORATIVE STONE (Late 19th century - 1897 AD? to 1897 AD?)

Full Description

This bowl barrow 'D' has an embedded memorial to the fallen soldiers of the First Battle of Newbury in 1643, and by tradition flowers are laid on it by local school children on the anniversary of the conflict. There is no firm evidence that the mounds contains any Civil War burials, although the historian Walter Money thought that the dead were buried in tumuli on Wash Common <1>. A report in the Newbury Weekly News of 1897 (perhaps by Money) said that in 1855 when the common was enclosed, the mounds were about to be levelled to make a road when human remains were found and the work was stopped <2>. "Human bones, soldiers' buckles, buttons and other accoutrements, bullets and cannon balls, were found in the soil which was removed." A resident had also claimed to have unearthed 3 or 4 skeletons on a "bright moonlit night", with several bushel baskets of bones being carted off to London <2>. Possibly the mound that was opened was the large bowl barrow 'B' at SU 45446484, as this is shown on the First Edition Ordance Survey mapping with a diverted road to its east <3>.

Grinsell's section on folklore associated with Berkshire Barrows <4> notes that the barrows on Wash Common are said to cover the remains of soldiers, with a Miss Champness, late of Newbury Museum, informing him that, "the dead were placed in 7 rows of 70 each and their horses were buried in a barrow all to themselves". Grinsell described this particular barrow as 30 paces in diameter and 5 feet hight with no visible ditch <5>. An Ordnance Survey field visit in the 1960s however <6> noted that there was a richer growth of grass around the base of the barrow, perhaps suggesting the location of an infilled ditch. English Heritage's National Mapping Programme transcribed the mound and a ditch around it from aerial photographs <7><8>.

The memorial stone to the Civil War dead is included in the scheduling of this barrow; it seems likely that the stone, along with a second on the adjacent barrow, was put up when the area was dedicated as a recreation ground in 1897. The low rectangular grey stone on the summit of the barrow has 'PEACE' on its uppermost surface and this inscription on one side:
'THIS STONE WAS PLACED ON THIS SACRED SPOT
DIAMOND JUBILEE DAY 1897'.
The inscription on the opposite face is less clearly legible <9>.

Sources and further reading

Related Monuments

Associated Excavations and Fieldwork

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