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Jugs Grave burial mound
Monkton Farleigh, Bradford on Avon, Wiltshire
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Jugs Grave is a Bronze Age burial mound in Inwood, Monkton Farleigh, near the border with Winsley. It was built up with large stones, of which there are plenty available on this plateau, rather like a cairn. The stones are now all thickly covered with the moss Thuidium tamariscinum and some trees are growing among the stones.
The name perhaps came from a discovery of fragments of pottery and bones at some point in the past. However, the word “grave” in place names around here is more often an alternative for “grove”, meaning a small wood.
The mound was excavated in 1946-7 by Guy Underwood, a retired lawyer and an amateur archaeologist who was living in Bradford on Avon. He is better known internationally as an authority on dowsing.
The excavations uncovered a primary burial of two skeletons in a stone cist with four Early Bronze Age flint arrowheads, some broken sherds of a probable beaker, a gold ‘sun disc’ jewel and a piece of what might be a bone ring. Also found here were some flint flakes and scrapers and a piece of stone that may have belonged to a stone mace-head. There were four secondary burials on the northern side of the mound.
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Amongst the things Underwood found in his excavation was a gold sun-disc, an extremely rare object cut from a thin sheet of metal and impressed with a cross within a circle pattern. It has been donated to the Wiltshire Museum, Devizes and joins the ‘Gold from the time of Stonehenge’ gallery.
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.Also found in the excavations were broken fragments of a pottery beaker. The pieces have been incorporated into a reconstruction of the complete vessel, which is in Bristol City Museum.
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