I. A Letter from John Gage, Esquire, Director, to Hudson Gurney, Esq. Vice President, &c. accompanying a Plan of Barrows called the Bartlow Hills, in the parish of Ashdon, in Essex, with an account of Roman sepulchral relics recently discovered in the lesser Barrows

Abstract

At the north-eastern extremity of the parish of Ashdon, in Essex, are certain artificial mounds, a plan of which I have the honour to lay before you. They consist, as you will observe, of a line of four greater Barrows, and of a line of three smaller Barrows, at the distance of between seventy and eighty feet in front of the others. The situation of these mounds is remarkable; they stand on a gentle acclivity in face of Bartlow church, the country gradually rising round them like an extended amphitheatre. Between the hills and the church, is a hollow to the north, down which runs a little brook that divides the parishes of Ashdon and Bartlow, forming the boundary of the counties of Essex and Cambridge. Though the hills do not belong to the parish of Bartlow, which is in Cambridgeshire, nor to the hamlet of Bartlow, which is in Essex, still, from the received interpretation of the Saxon word Low a Barrow, it is clear that they give name to the place, a proof of their antiquity. Ashdon church stands considerably more than a mile distant, and is not visible from the hills.