This site comprises a Neolithic long barrow reused in the Romano-British period as a small inhumation cemetery, located on the chalk downland of Whitehorse Hill immediately north of the Iron Age hillfort of Uffington Castle and close to the Uffington White Horse. The Roman-period burials likely date to the 3rd–4th century AD, a phase when prehistoric monuments across the Berkshire Downs were frequently selected as burial foci.
Source: Pleiades — A Community-Built Gazetteer and Graph of Ancient Places. View the Pleiades record →
The cemetery reflects a well-attested late Roman practice in southern Britain of inserting inhumations into earlier funerary monuments — a phenomenon also seen at sites like Wayland's Smithy and along the Ridgeway — suggesting deliberate appropriation of ancestral landscape features rather than association with a specific settlement or villa. Its position beside Uffington Castle and the White Horse places it within one of the most monumentally rich ritual landscapes of the Berkshire Downs.
Investigations associated with the wider Whitehorse Hill project in the 1990s (notably the work directed by David Miles and Simon Palmer for the Oxford Archaeological Unit) identified Romano-British inhumations inserted into the long barrow mound, though the published detail on grave goods and individual burials from this specific feature is limited. Beyond the recorded presence of late Roman burials cut into the barrow, little has been formally published on the cemetery's full extent or demography.
This site comprises a Neolithic long barrow reused in the Romano-British period as a small inhumation cemetery, located on the chalk downland of Whitehorse Hill immediately north of the Iron Age hillfort of Uffington Castle and close to the Uffington White Horse. It is recorded in the Pleiades gazetteer of ancient places as a cemetery site from the Roman period in Britain.
Neolithic long barrow and Romano-British inhumation cemetery 70m north of Uffington Castle on Whitehorse Hill is classified as a Roman cemetery — a civilian site in the Pleiades ancient world gazetteer. Roman Britain's archaeology encompasses thousands of sites ranging from legionary fortresses and marching camps to villas, temples and towns.
Several Roman sites lie within a short distance, including Woolstone (1.4 km), Wayland's Smithy chambered long barrow, including an earlier barrow and Iron Age and Roman boundary ditches (2.2 km), Maddle Farm Roman settlement (3.8 km). Aubrey Research maps over 2,200 Roman sites across Britain, drawn from the Pleiades ancient world gazetteer.
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Research the area around Neolithic long barrow and Romano-British inhumation cemetery 70m north of Uffington Castle on Whitehorse Hill