Monument record MDO3801 - Hand-in-Hand flint cairn, New Town, Tollard Farnham

Later Neolithic flint cairn. Located at the southeast end of long low natural mound. Aligned roughly northwest to southeast on low local ridge and capped with heavy clay with flints.

ST 948 157. Ring-ditch near Tallard Farnham. A ridge, considered to be a long-barrow by Grinsell <1> stands at the eastern edge of a dense flint scatter. A large quantity of burnt and worked flint lay all around the cairn. The absence of burnt bone from the scatter suggests a ritual rather than funerary function. An un-urned cremation was recently ploughed out 100m SW of the cairns. <2> ST 94701575. Later Neolithic flint cairn at SE end of long low natural mound, length 45 m. Set roughly NW-SE in arable on low ridge capped by heavy clay-with-flints. <3> A cairn of suggested late Neolithic origin at Tollard Farnham. Discovered by Martin Green circa 1981, the site was marked on the surface by a discrete scatter of burnt flint and large nodules in the ploughsoil, occurring at the end of a slight northwest-southeast ridge and at the eastern edge of an extensive and dense flint scatter. Numerous worked flints had been recovered from the area by General Pitt Rivers in the later 19th century. In 1984, four trenches were dug in and around the burnt flint scatter, only one encountering any archaeological features. These comprised in situ remains of the cairn, and it is presumed that the burnt and nodular flint in the topsoil was derived from this cairn. The burnt area itself was circa 3.2 by 2 metres, and was surrounded by a scatter of large nodules. The layer of burnt material contained some worked flint plus a few sherds of prehistoric pottery, one sherd of which may be of Early Bronze Age date, though unfortunately it came from a disturbed context. Interpretation of the cairn proved difficult on the basis of the excavated evidence. While no bone was recovered, its location, as well as the inclusion of both burnt and unburnt flint, suggest a ritual or funerary rather than domestic or agricultural interpretation. The four trenches produced over 700 worked flints, most of them flakes, although some scrapers and three oblique arrowheads were present. The excavated lithic assemblage was suggested to be broadly of later Neolithic date, pointing to a similar date for the cairn itself. Grinsell included the site in his gazetteer of Dorset long barrows, although the basis for this interpretation is not clear. He refers to it being found by Martin Green, although in their excavation report, Bowden and Tingle imply that the long barrow interpretation was Grinsell's, not Green's. RCHME, in contrast, described the site as a flint cairn at the end of a long low natural mound. <4>

Record last edited

Aug 22 2022 5:48PM