Stanwick Lakes: Bronze Age barrow freed from decades of brambles

How it looked: Regular visitors said they had no idea a burial mound was hidden under the weeds and brambles

A Bronze Age burial mound hidden under decades of grass, weeds and brambles is being restored as part of a £250,000 ancient history project.

Regular visitors to Stanwick Lakes nature reserve, Northamptonshire, said they had no idea the site - known as a barrow - was even there.

The scheduled monument is one of a number of barrows in the area.

Heritage co-ordinator Nadia Norman said the work was intended to preserve the site for another 4,000 years.

It has now been cleared as part of a project to tell the story of the people who lived there in the Bronze and Iron ages

Archaeologists discovered grave goods in the burial mound, including flints, Whitby jet beads and a Beaker ware pot

The monument is one of a series of interlinked Neolithic and Bronze Age barrows, with some excavated ahead of gravel extraction work in the mid-1980s to early 1990s.

Mrs Norman said it was "the only one existing in the county which the public can access by footpath".

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She said an excavation in another barrow about 400m (1,312ft) away "found the remains of a man aged 25 to 35, with a Beaker ware pot, jet beads from Whitby and a flint dagger".

"And there was also a secondary cremation burial, which had a Baltic amber ring and a copper dagger," she said.

However, there are no current plans to excavate the Stanwick Lakes barrow.

Nadia Norman hoped the project would help visitors to the Stanwick Lakes nature reserve explore its heritage

Volunteers and rangers spent six weeks in the summer heatwave clearing the site of grass and brambles, as part of the three-year National Lottery Heritage funded project.

The barrow is about 2m (6.5ft) high at its centre and about 40m (131ft) wide, including encircling ditches. It is largely intact - apart from where a Victorian railway line cut through.

Next stages of the work include removing an earth bund, put up to prevent damage from gravel extraction lorries, and protecting it from burrowing rabbits.

An earth bund has been removed and it will now be protected from further erosion - 4,000-years ago it would have been 3m (10ft) tall

The project will also fund the building of a Bronze Age-style boat and an Iron Age farm settlement as the focus of a living history experience - the first Iron Age round house is already being built.

Mrs Norman said it aimed to bring the heritage revealed by the excavations to the nature reserve's visitors.

"The barrow is a really special place with a really special feel to it," she said.

The next stage of the three-year project is to build an Iron Age settlement suitable for re-enactments