Once there were three tumuli alongside the road
between Revesby village and the abbey gates, but
there are now only two. Of course, Joseph Banks
III got interested in these, and had the northern
one excavated in October 1780.

Banks’s team found only ‘bitts of coal run almost to
glass such as come out of the blacksmith’s fires, and
a small piece of unburnt coal, some lumps of granite,
and a small stone flatted and coarsely moulded
about one and a half inches in diameter of the granite
kind, but differing from any species of granite
that I have seen’. They dug right down to ground
level from the top but there was nothing more exciting
than ‘the pieces of a small twig or switch not
yet decayed’.

This barrow was levelled – often suggested to have
been in 1892 when further excavations took place,
though the Stamford Mercury in 1861 referred to
only two being there at that time and so did the
sculptor Thomas Wilkinson Wallis, who visited in
1858. The tumuli have never yet yielded any treasure
of significance, save for some pottery and a
piece of bone possibly from a dog. Experts at first
thought them to be Roman, but some now favour
Bronze Age; the Lincolnshire Historic Environment
Record considers the vanished northern one to
have Bronze Age but the two surviving ones ‘Roman-
era’.

Of course, such a place accumulated many legends
which have been told and retold over the last few
years. Inevitably one was that this was the burial
place of ancient kings – perhaps closer to the truth
than the story that it was the meeting places of
witches and the Devil. One story had it that an old
soldier was determined to find out the truth about
the devil and so waited there overnight; he was
found in the morning, much battered, and unable to speak of his experiences.

With such places someone’s assertion becomes a
later ‘fact’ so that the Lincolnshire Standard was
able to report in 1950 that ‘two Saxon kings’ were
buried there – perhaps unaware that there had
been three tumuli! Saxons came much later than
the origins of these barrows.

What of the ‘old soldier’ story? In 1937 we find Mr
H Swales giving a lecture on Lincolnshire folklore.
In Swales’s version a king’s messenger stayed overnight
at a Revesby inn but noticed that all appeared
very nervous – and he was warned to keep to his
room. Inevitably he ignored this warning and instead
crept outside at night, and came to the tumuli
– to find forty spectral figures dancing on top
of them. Then they rushed at him, grabbed him
with their talons, and carried him up into the air……
when he lost consciousness. The innkeeper found
him in the morning, with cuts and broken bones,
but still alive – but the messenger vowed never to
visit Lincolnshire again. It seems likely that Swales
got this story from an earlier book called Legends of
the Fenland People, which dated the witch incident
to 1632.

Adrian Gray, MA