The Lamb Down Excavations, the unknown woman and the connections to Codford - Romy Wyeth.

  The Codford Badge, which was originally carved out in the chalk hillside by Australian troops who nicknamed it Misery Hill during the Great War, is well known to Codford villagers, but many are unfamiliar with it’s earlier significance and a few are aware that the period of settlement in the village environs stretches back to New Stone Age. The Stonehenge  landscape on Salisbury Plain is in effect ‘The Valley of the Kings’ for the prehistoric  dead, and Codford plays a part in a timeline that begins between 5000 and 240 BC. Sometime in prehistory a young woman was laid to rest for millennia. 

Between 23rd June and 29th July 1958  distinguished  Archaeologist Faith De Mallet Vatcher excavated five of the six scattered Lamb Down barrows for the Ministry of Works. 

The first site excavated was a fine chalk Bowl Barrow inside a shallow ditch. This mound showed evidence of grave robbing. It contained a single male human femur head, some  adult  finger bones and two later fragments of a Romano - British moratorium. In other words, after the original burial there had been a cessation of activity for a period.  

 South of the grave there was an extended intrusive burial, the skeleton of a young woman in her early twenties.  The top of her head was close to the surface, very close to the modern plough soil. She had an iron penannular  or Celtic brooch on her left shoulder. These brooches were incomplete rings, used as clothes fasteners.  Given its size   the conclusion was that this was likely to have been used to fasten a shroud rather than a heavy garment.  The inclusion of the brooch also suggested the woman was of a high status within the community.   There was evidence of brutality during the grave robbery, certainly a total lack of respect as  both her legs had been cut off, one above and the other below the knee. It is a distinct possibility that the finger bones found in the Bowl Barrow may have belonged to this woman. The brooch alone doesn’t indicate the date of the burial, however an educated guess would suggest that the burial could be 1st century either before or after the birth of Christ.  

The   information is an article by Faith De Mallet Vatcher published in Volume 58 of ‘The Wiltshire Archaeological and Natural History Magazine’ in September 1963.