West Kennet Long Barrow

West Kennet Long Barrow is a hundred-meter burial mound raised in the thirty-seventh century BCE, its five stone chambers holding the remains of a whole community deposited over generations, and its entrance deliberately blocked with great sarsen boulders in the late Neolithic, sealed until antiquarians opened it in 1859 and archaeologists re-excavated it in the 1950s. Because its chamber is tall enough to stand in, it became the rare tomb that is an interior experience: modern visitors, pagans, and pilgrims file into the same dark rooms where people once communed with their dead.

It anchors the Avebury ritual landscape's World Heritage ensemble, the henge and the avenue and the enigmatic Silbury Hill all within a walk, and it remains an active node for seasonal gatherings at the solstices.

Visiting

English Heritage keeps it free and open year-round; the walk in is short from the parking near Silbury Hill, and any reasonable daylight hour works.

Photo: [Wikimedia Commons](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:West_Kennet_Long_Barrow), CC BY-SA 2.0.