Accounts of the early barrow-diggers are chilling, both in their tales of prehistoric wood and textiles that blew away to dust at the touch of the spade, and in their vigour, a barrow quarried out in an afternoon, a barrow cemetery in a fortnight. Salvage imperatives, in advance of destruction by drainage in the Lincolnshire Fens, now make necessary the rare excavation of a whole barrow cemetery, with a happier organic outcome.