Winterbourne Poor Lot Barrows

Winterbourne Poor Lot Barrows is a Bronze Age cemetery of 44 round burial mounds beside the A35 west of Winterbourne Abbas in Dorset. The mounds lie on low ground at the head of a valley rather than on a ridge or hilltop. They were raised about 1500 BC and are protected as ancient monuments by English Heritage. The barrows include twenty-two bowl barrows, seven bell barrows, six disc barrows, five pond barrows and two bell-disc barrows. Two rough alignments of mounds run south of the road on a small plateau where every barrow can be seen. One alignment features a large bell barrow 40 metres across and 3.7 metres high next to a disc barrow 32 metres wide. The other alignment holds a prominent bell barrow 35 metres in diameter and 3.4 metres tall. Visitors walk the plateau and view the mounds in their groupings. The excavated pond barrows show flint paving and pits but no human remains. The site offers a quiet place to stand among the grassy mounds and imagine the Bronze Age people who built them.