Photo Pages: Wayland's Smithy - Long Barrow in England in Oxfordshire

About 5500 years ago a tomb was built on this hill-top. The oval mound ws made of chalk dug from two side ditches and was edged with stone slabs. It covered a wooden chamber containing the remains of about fifteen people. The tomb may have served as a focus for ceremonies that linked the living and the dead: it may also have marked the community's ownership of the surrounding land.

Around 3300 BC a new tomb was built on top of the earlier one, completely hiding it. The new mound was four times as long and much more regular in shape. At one end were three stone-lined burial chambers. The new tomb may have been used for several hundred years before being sealed. When the chambers were examined in 1920 they had already been ransacked, but they still contained the jumbled remains of at least eight people.

Wayland's Smithy got its name some four thousand years later, when Saxon settlers came across the tomb. Not knowing who had built it, they imagined it was the work of one of their gods, Wayland the Smith. Later, a legend grew that Wayland would re-shoe the horse of any passing traveller who left a silver penny beside the tomb.