A type of burial used 5,000 years ago is available again as families mourning loved ones seek a better way of doing death

In a little copse of oak, hazel and willow trees, on the edge of a ploughed field in Cambridgeshire, a door is opening into a new way of death for 21st-century Britain: a brand new stone-and-earth round barrow, a burial mound of a type perfected more than 5,000 years ago.



Beyond the low, narrow door, the stone walls curving up to a corbelled roof are lined with hundreds of niches, waiting for the living to pay up to £4,800 to lease a space for the cremated remains of loved ones to rest for 99 years – and, its creators hope, for centuries longer than that.

Before the official launch of the Sacred Stones burial mound, the first booking for a niche came from a man on his mobile phone, standing in a car park outside the hospital where his father was gravely ill.



Facebook Twitter Pinterest The space is lit with candles when visitors are expected

The early visitors have included potential clients but also landowners curious about the investment potential, a vicar, a bank manager who had already agreed the loan but was fascinated by the project, and several local authority planners.

Some who stepped into the cool darkness – there is no electricity, and the space is lit with candles when visitors are expected – away from the sound of birdsong and the traffic on the busy road a few fields away have burst into tears, some laughed out loud, and many just sat down on the stone bench and remained for some time in silence.

It was the blue nylon carpet in an urban crematorium that convinced Toby Angel there had to be a better way of doing death.



Facebook Twitter Pinterest The corbelled roof of the burial mound

“We cremated my poor aunt, and it was the absolutely typical affair, blue carpet, Luther Vandross, 20 minutes later the next family is hanging around looking embarrassed waiting to get in, and everyone shuffles out to look at the flowers. It’s become the norm, and it’s absolutely dreadful.”

He describes the new burial mound as “a secular space full of faith”.

His business partner Martin Fildes is a master builder who took up traditional stone walling when he couldn’t bear the boredom of building identical brick boxes any longer. He spoke to one young mother with terminal cancer, who wanted cremation but didn’t want her ashes scattered: her children, she felt, would need a place where they could come and rage with anger against her for abandoning them.

The first new barrow they know of was built by Tim Daw, a farmer and amateur archaeologist, on his land in Wiltshire near Stonehenge, and is now two-thirds full. Fildes heard that Daw was going to build in concrete, and approached him to suggest a traditional structure instead, built in hand-dressed slabs of stone without cement, and sheltered by a mound of earth, like the West Kennet Long Barrow near his farm which was built more than 5,000 years ago.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Toby Angel outside the burial mound

Daw’s was a one-off, but Angel, Fildes, scientist Mark Davis and stonemason Geraint Davies have formed a new company, Sacred Stones, to develop the concept. Willow Row was built in just five months out of 300 tonnes of limestone from a quarry in Oundle, on a small patch of land leased for the next century on a farm near Saint Neots. They already have planning permission for a site in Herefordshire, and as word spreads have had inquiries from half a dozen counties, from Orkney, and even from Canada. They have been asked about woodland burials, ash scattering, and funeral pyres – the latter an interesting idea, Angel said, but not for them, or not yet.

Sophie Churchill, a forestry expert and president of the Royal Forestry Society, is also project leader of the strikingly named Corpse Project, a research project backed by the Wellcome Institute on contemporary attitudes to death, which has been looking at what happens to the bodies of the 500,000 people who die in England and Wales every year. Most are now cremated, with issues including the materials used in coffins, the toxic byproducts of embalming, and where to scatter gritty salty ashes without choking trees and plants to death.

They offer brutally practical advice: anyone planning to lay out a body for a wake at home in the traditional way, in a centrally heated modern house, is advised to stock up on ice packs well in advance.

“In England we have been very bad at confronting the reality of death until it actually occurs, and then we stumble into it an very awkward, embarrassed way. But there are signs that attitudes are changing, and I think Toby’s project – certainly not an option for everyone – is part of that.”



The first great revolution was the widespread acceptance of cremation, she says. She sees another under way now in the natural death movement, death cafes, homemade funerals, cardboard and wicker coffins – once seen as appealing only to a hippy fringe, now available from high street undertakers – woodland burials, and a growing acceptance that with conventional cemeteries running out of space fast, there will have to be an alternative to an eternal resting place six feet under.

Toby Angel thinks death should be taught in schools. “It’s the one thing that is absolutely certainly going to happen to all of us, and yet we are given no help whatsoever to prepare for it.”

He hopes that the days when the urns are placed in the niches can be joyful occasions for the families.

“There must be tea and biscuits. Bring a brass band. Bring a bottle. Bring a priest. Bring a shaman. Death is sad, but it doesn’t have to be solemn.”