A hill farm on the
West Mendip Way

High on Shiplate Slait, ancient burial mounds have watched over this stretch of the Mendip Hills for around four thousand years.

Known as bowl barrows, the mounds date from the Late Neolithic to Late Bronze Age — roughly 2400 to 1500 BC. They were built as funerary monuments, often for an important individual or family, sometimes added to over generations. At least three survive on the hill today, though the ground here has likely held more once — the wider area has a long history of burial and ceremony stretching back millennia.

The largest is around 10 metres across and still stands over a metre high, with a shallow ditch running around it where the material for the mound was originally dug. The smaller mounds nearby are more modest, but no less old. Antiquarian records show the site was known as far back as 1757, and a 19th-century account by the local historian Phelps describes earlier excavation turning up skeletons and cremated remains — a reminder that these are real resting places.

All of this sits within the Mendip Hills National Landscape, part of a much wider scatter of Bronze Age burial sites across the plateau. Each one adds to the picture of how communities here lived, worked, and buried their dead thousands of years ago — and the mounds on Loxton Hill are a rare, still-legible piece of that story.

These are old graves, and we ask that they're treated as such. They lie on private land and can only be seen by guests staying on the farm. We'd ask that anyone who does see them leaves them quietly undisturbed, as they've been for four thousand years.