Also a former golf course around the barrows on Petersfield Heath - it closed in the 1990s but would have been active when Stuart Piggott cut his teeth recording the monuments as a schoolboy

Therfield Heath

Ditto!

One Nutcracker Man and one man who’s nuts and crackers

Agreed - the sense of the whole community contributing to the burial and to building the monument is rather compelling

So here it is, hiding in plain sight near the A3, a brick obelisk of 1777 commemorating "the invention of FIRE PLATES for securing buildings from FIRE By DAVID HARTLEY ESQ". It seems oddly appropriate that a monument to fire safety should now mark the area where the cremated dead were once interred.

And I do have a (rather battered) copy of Johnson & Wright, so let's see. Ah, here's a tantalising note about Wimbledon Common: "Twenty-three barrows once stood near the fire obelisk on Wimbledon Common…". Fire obelisk? The barrows may be gone but I had to find this crazy sounding monument!

As noted in my essay on Tarv, the scene is referenced by Grinsell in his 1934 paper on Surrey barrows as "a vivid account of the burial of a prehistoric chief in a barrow on Wimbledon Common." Unfortunately there's now little sign of these barrows on the ground, but LVG does list other accounts…

“Characteristically”, to take one example, “what could be justified in six lines… takes eight paragraphs (and a quotation from Whitman) to expound” while one review describes the thing as a “two-in-one grand dirigible”. So I’m very much looking forward to seeing what I find…

For Forbes’ biographer the book “failed to justify by success the expenditure of time, money, taste & scholarship. The college is reputed to have put £6,000 into the enterprise, a considerable sum in 1930… beautiful, witty, learned, it has obstinately refused to become a 'rare book' or widely read”

The volumes were entertainingly edited by the eccentric English don Mansfield Forbes whose opening ‘Apologia; some virtues of delay’ outlines the problems caused by “the far-reaching contrariness of the General Strike” and the loss of a key contributor to an unspecified breakdown

We can write about the heterotopic qualities of these juxtapositions of new builds and ancient places, or how deep time might open new perspectives on present-day issues, but it doesn't get us very far unless archaeological synthesis and story-telling are embedded in planning and cultural activities

Well I’m in Woking and there’s really not much worth having…