Qualla: Shrub's Wood Long Barrow

Shrub's Wood Long Barrow: Introduction

Tue, 19 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Ethan Doyle White, CC BY-SA 3.0. It hides in plain sight. Shrub's Wood Long Barrow - an earthen mound 38 metres long, 19 metres wide, two metres high at its eastern end - has sat in a Kentish wood near the village of Elmsted for nearly six thousand years. Antiquarians knew about Julliberrie's Grave a few kilometres away by the 16th century. Archaeologists discovered Shrub's Wood in the late 1960s; J. Bradshaw published the first formal report in Archaeologia Cantiana in 1970. The mound has never been excavated. The community that built it - some of the first farmers in Britain, working in the fourth millennium BCE - left their dead inside, sealed up the earth above them, and went on living their pastoral lives in a Britain still mostly covered in forest.

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Image: Ethan Doyle White | CC BY-SA 3.0

Shrub's Wood Long Barrow: The First Farmers

Tue, 19 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Ethan Doyle White, CC BY-SA 3.0. The Early Neolithic - roughly 4500 to 3800 BCE - was a turning point in British history. The hunter-gatherer Mesolithic way of life that had filled the post-glacial millennia gave way to something new: agriculture, brought in either by migrants from continental Europe or learned ...

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Image: Ethan Doyle White | CC BY-SA 3.0

Shrub's Wood Long Barrow: Tomb-Shrines on the Hills

Tue, 19 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Midnightblueowl at English Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. What these communities did do was build monuments. Across Western Europe in the Early Neolithic, humans began for the first time to make permanent structures on the landscape - tombs, sometimes timber, more often stone, to hold the collective dead. Individuals were rarely buried ...

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Image: Midnightblueowl at English Wikipedia | CC BY-SA 4.0

Shrub's Wood Long Barrow: The Stour Group

Tue, 19 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Ethan Doyle White, CC BY-SA 3.0. Archaeologists know of around twelve Neolithic long barrows in Kent. The famous Medway Megaliths cluster around the River Medway - the Coldrum Stones, Addington Long Barrow, the Chestnuts Long Barrow, Kit's Coty House and Little Kit's Coty House, Smythe's Megalith now destroyed, ...

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Image: Ethan Doyle White | CC BY-SA 3.0

Shrub's Wood Long Barrow: The Mound Itself

Tue, 19 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Ethan Doyle White, CC BY-SA 3.0. Shrub's Wood Long Barrow is roughly oval, aligned east to west, 38 metres long and 19 metres wide at its broadest point. The eastern end stands about 2 metres high; the western end is slightly lower. Side ditches flank the mound, gently curved and between 5 and a few more metres ...

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Image: Ethan Doyle White | CC BY-SA 3.0

Shrub's Wood Long Barrow: Found, But Not Opened

Tue, 19 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Ethan Doyle White, CC BY-SA 3.0. While Julliberrie's Grave - the largest of the Stour barrows - had been known to antiquarians at least since the 16th century and was partly excavated by Ronald Jessup in the 1930s, Shrub's Wood and Jacket's Field were not formally identified until decades later. Jessup himself h...

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Image: Ethan Doyle White | CC BY-SA 3.0