White Hill Bell Barrow, Brandon, Suffolk

This one is an absolute cracker! Remarkably, this enormous earthwork was completely unrecorded until forestry felling operations cleared the compartment in the 1980s. Nineteenth-century maps of Brandon Park had simply plotted a woodland block here named Whitehill Plantation, with no inkling of what lay beneath the canopy.

Subsequent detailed study of this monument has identified it as a bell barrow – a rare high-status prehistoric burial monument associated with the Early Bronze Age. Finding a bell barrow of this scale outside its typical heartland in Wessex was a major revelation. Its discovery fully justified the subsequent professional earthwork surveys undertaken by the Suffolk and Norfolk Archaeology Services across the wider Thetford Forest landscape.