Two tombs, one on top of the other
Wayland’s Smithy is a chambered long barrow in a ring of beech trees, about 50 metres north of the Ridgeway and a mile and a half west of Whitehorse Hill. Excavations in 1962–63 by Richard Atkinson and Stuart Piggott showed that it was built in two stages.
The first monument was a mortuary structure of wood and stone: a narrow timber box on a pavement of sarsen slabs, with split tree trunks set upright at each end. The remains of fourteen people, eleven men, two women and a child, were found in it. Radiocarbon dating published by English Heritage places the first burials in 3590–3555 BC and the last in 3580–3550 BC, so the tomb was used for no more than about fifteen years. Several of the dead may have been killed by arrows. After a gap, the structure was covered with an oval mound of chalk and earth.
Between about 3460 and 3400 BC a much larger long barrow was built over the first. It has a trapezoid mound edged with sarsen kerb stones, a façade of tall sarsen slabs at its southern end, and a stone-built passage with side chambers behind the façade, in the Cotswold-Severn tradition. It was used for burials for less than a century. English Heritage notes that it was built in the style of tombs such as West Kennet that were already two centuries old, perhaps to claim a link with the past.
The name
An Anglo-Saxon charter of AD 955 already calls the barrow ‘Weland’s smithy’, after the smith of Germanic legend. A later local story says that if you left your horse here overnight with a coin, the invisible smith would shoe it by morning. John Aubrey recorded the monument in the 17th century, and it was among the first ancient monuments protected by law in 1882. Iron Age and Roman field-boundary ditches crossing the site are included in the scheduling.
Visiting
The barrow is in the care of English Heritage, free and open at any reasonable time. There is no road access: it is reached on foot along the Ridgeway, about 1½ miles west of the National Trust car park at White Horse Hill, or about three-quarters of a mile east of the Ridgeway car park on the B4000 above Ashbury. Please do not climb on the stones.
Nearby
Uffington Castle and the White Horse lie east along the Ridgeway. The monument is in Ashbury parish, just outside the Wantage area villages, but it is usually visited together with White Horse Hill.