Laying his body in its dark chamber, the few tribesmen allowed inside the mound uttered their final words to their chief before returning out into the sunlight where the crowd was gathered. Deep inside a large fire were the bones of their previous leader, being returned to the earth by the heat of the flames. On seeing the elders emerge, the people began to throw flowers and sheaves of wheat onto the pyre before pointing their faces skywards and entering together into the song of the dead.

I’m making up every single word of this, of course; I have absolutely no idea about neolithic burial practices, but then it seems nobody else really does either (although evidence does suggest that bones were removed from their resting places to be used in some sort of ritual). All anybody seems sure of is that the more prominent people had their bodies lain to rest in large, communal chambers, or long barrows as they are known.

The West Kennet Long Barrow is one such place, one of the most famous of its kind. Built a full millennium before anyone in Giza had struck upon the ostentatious idea of grossly oversized pyramids, you can count on one hand the number of existing man-made buildings that are older than this stony chamber in the entire world. The 5,500 year-old structure is part of the Stonehenge and Avebury UNESCO World Heritage Site and marks an important change in human history, the shift away from being nomadic hunter-gatherers to being the inhabitants of fixed agricultural communities. This is people creating permanent buildings for their dead, tying themselves to a specific location for the first time.

My girlfriend and I decided to visit on a warm Sunday morning. Parking is available in a layby on the main road but we chose to use the car park provided a couple of hundred metres further on at the other nearby attraction, Silbury Hill. At 131 feet high, this has the fairly tenuous honour of being the ‘highest man-made prehistoric hill in Europe’ (I’m not sure how much competition there is for that particular title), although quite why man did make it is entirely unknown, despite some educated guesswork. From a visiting point of view, due to a mixture of conservation and health & safety regulations there is very little to do there other than view it from a distance.

Silbury Hill.

Walking little more than a Usain Bolt-esque distance past the hill, you arrive at the bottom of the track towards the Long Barrow. There is no need to be concerned with opening times; the English Heritage website gives the gloriously laissez-faire guideline of ‘any reasonable time during daylight hours’ and entrance is not just free but entirely unregulated.

This track was sprinkled with a steady trickle of visitors making their way over what little of the River Kennet had survived this far into the summer and up the side of a small-ish hill to where the Long Barrow sits prominently on the brow. In complete contrast to Silbury Hill, visitors are more than welcome to wander around, over and inside the burial chamber, although perhaps a little more could be done to provide guidance and information beyond the one sign they have near the entrance.

For the most part it looks from the outside like a long, thin mound of grass which rises up almost inexplicably from the middle of a farmer’s field. People walk along the top of it, as though like they are venturing down the back of a giant crocodile, admiring the panoramic views of the surrounding countryside. While maintained, it is by no means pristine and wild flowers grow over and around it, making it all feel less of a tourist attraction and more the authentic tomb is was built as.

A line of large stones provides a screen that semi-hides the entrance, itself composed of a structure reminiscent of the Stonehenge arches. Inside, the dark stone walls and dirt floor are illuminated by some fairly jarring skylights that have been installed in the roof which, while functional, do little to maintain the illusion of ancient man.

There are four chambers coming off a main passageway which leads to a fifth at the western end. A number of visitors had left small bunches of wheat and flowers on some of the stones, seemingly one of the paganistic rituals that the neolithic landscape still draws to the area. They hint that the site is a place of pilgrimage for the modern druids who come here alongside the more celebrated attractions at Stonehenge and Avebury.

One of many bunches of wildflowers placed on stones within the chamber.

People wandered in, poked their heads into each of the chambers and headed back to the door. In truth there isn’t a huge amount to see or do, people wanting the spectacular will only be disappointed, but there is something fairly remarkable about being in building that has been around longer than almost any other on the planet, somewhere that has seen both flint axes and iPhones as the peak of technology.

Back outside, and from the top of the mound we looked down towards Silbury Hill and beyond towards where the Avebury stone circles stand. On the slope below us someone had flattened the wheat into a crop circle. All together it provided a vision of what makes this a particularly strange part of the world; the ancient history, the enduring paganism, the ‘mysterious’ crop circles, all largely unrelated and yet somehow feeling part of one timeline. And just a few miles away a new long barrow is currently under construction using the same old methods.

Standing on top of the burial chamber, looking down towards Silbury Hill.

Perhaps this is why the West Kennet Long Barrow is not cordoned off and kept away from the public, because here ancient history is still somehow current. The past is not sanitised and kept behind glass museum cases but is allowed to continue as part of the same modern life that makes grand patterns in fields and leaves offerings to the ‘earth mother’ in tombs. History is not really history at all. Enter as please, do as you need and be on your way again, just as people have for five and a half millennia.

For our return we chose a path along the tractor lines through the field, pausing briefly as we stood in in the centre of the crop circle. The visit had been short but illuminating, and despite the lack of any real action it should certainly be part of the tour taken by anyone seeking to understand what Wiltshire is truly all about.