Sacred London

Places of religious significance. Worth a visit for the architecture, the art or the history.

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Greenwich Park Anglo-Saxon Barrows

A field of burial mounds under the trees on the east side of the park, and the nearest thing London has to a heathen burial ground you can walk across.

Everything else on this list is a building. This is a patch of uneven grass beside The Avenue, and most people walking over it have no idea what it is: a group of low mounds raised over Anglo-Saxon burials, spread through the trees, worn down by a thousand years of weather and several centuries of people crossing them.

They belong to the years when the kingdom of Kent was moving from its old gods to the new one, so calling them pre-Christian is half right; burying the dead under a mound with their possessions is a heathen habit that did not stop the moment a king was baptised. What they do show is that this hill was being used for the dead long before there was a palace, an observatory or a park here, and long before anyone had drawn a line through it.

Go in winter when the ground is bare. The mounds are much easier to read without the grass, and the Royal Parks' own description - the distinctive mounds of the Anglo-Saxon cemetery to the east - is about as much signage as you will get.

Where
The Avenue, Greenwich Park, SE10 8QY
Nearest station
Maze Hill · 10 min walk

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