© The University of Manchester
Manchester's Professor Julian Thomas, who led the excavation, says the imposing Herefordshire tomb is linked to nearby 'halls of the dead', which were discovered in 2013 by a team led by Professor Thomas.
It is the first time the construction - which inspired the 'stone table' in C.S. Lewis' The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe - has been properly excavated.
Dating to the Neolithic period in 3700BC, Arthur's Stone is located on a lonely hilltop outside of the village of Dorstone, facing the Black Mountains in south Wales.
Archaeologists always assumed that its massive capstone raised on a series of supporting stones and lesser chamber with a right-angled passage had stood within a wedge-shaped stone cairn, similar to those found in the Cotswolds and South Wales. However, Professor Thomas and Cardiff's Prof Keith Ray showed the monument originally extended into a field immediately to the south of the tomb.
Arthur's Stone is a scheduled monument cared for by English Heritage. The excavations took place in an area to the south of the burial chamber, outside of the area of guardianship.
They found that the tomb had first been a long mound composed of stacked turf, retained by a palisade of upright posts set in a narrow palisade surrounding the mound. However, when the posts rotted away and the mound had collapsed, an avenue of larger posts were added, leading toward the mound from the Golden Valley below.
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