page_title: Cotswold-Severn Group
section_title: Definition
hierarchical_section_title: Cotswold-Severn Group / Definition
caption_attribution_description: English: One of Britains best examples of a neolithic long barrow, located on the Ridgeway, close to the Uffington white horse in Oxfordshire.
context_page_description: The Cotswold-Severn Group are a series of long barrows erected in an area of western Britain during the Early Neolithic. Around 200 known examples of long barrows are known from the Cotswold-Severn region, although an unknown number of others were likely destroyed prior to being recorded.
context_section_description: The concept of the "Cotswold-Severn group" was coined by 1937 by the archaeologist Glyn Daniel. They represent a regional grouping of long barrows, a broader architectural tradition found across Atlantic Europe. This tradition stretches from southeast Spain up to southern Sweden, taking in the British Isles to the west. Overall, about 40,000 long barrows are known to survive from the Early Neolithic across Europe. The long barrows are not the world's oldest known structures using stone—they are predated by Göbekli Tepe in modern Turkey—but they do represent the oldest widespread tradition of using stone in construction. The archaeologist Frances Lynch has described them as "the oldest built structures in Europe" to survive. Although found across this large area, they can be subdivided into clear regionalised traditions based on architectural differences, of which the Cotswold-Severn Group is one.
  The long barrow tradition originated somewhere in the area of modern Spain, Portugal, and western France; here, the long barrows were first erected in the mid-fifth millennium BCE. The tradition then spread north, along the Atlantic coast. It had reached Britain by the first half of the fourth millennium BCE, either soon after farming or in some cases perhaps just before it, and then moved into other parts of northern Europe, for instance arriving in the area of the modern Netherlands by the second half of the fourth millennium BCE.
  On the basis of dates ascertained from a number of excavations, Darvill argued that long barrows appeared in the Cotswolds-Severn region fairly abruptly around 3700 BCE. They continued to be built for about 600 years. By 2600 BCE, very few of them had chambers that remained in active use and many had been deliberately blocked up.
  Within the Cotswolds-Severn area, there are around 200 known long barrows. An unknown number have been destroyed before ever having been recorded; at least ten of those that had been recorded have since been destroyed or lost.
  Over 140 long barrows are known within the Cotswolds area itself.
  In northern Wiltshire and in the Dorset chalk hills, the Cotswold-Severn Group of long barrows overlap with the style of earthen barrow found largely across the east of the island.
caption: The entrance to Wayland's Smithy, one of the Cotswold-Severn Group in modern Oxfordshire.
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