Qualla: Obadiah's Barrow

Obadiah's Barrow: Introduction

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Andrew Abbott, CC BY-SA 2.0. The barrow is named for a man who almost certainly never saw it built. Obadiah Hicks was a farmer on St Agnes in 1901, and when the British archaeologist George Bonsor came to Scilly to excavate the prehistoric monuments of Gugh, Hicks gave him a place to sleep. Bonsor, in return, named the largest entrance grave on the island after his host. The grave itself is roughly four thousand years older than that gesture. It sits on the steep southwestern slope of Kittern Hill, the higher of Gugh's two granite summits, and looks out across the open Atlantic toward the Western Rocks. Thirty-three feet across, nearly five feet high - low enough that you could walk past it without noticing, if you weren't looking for the slab-edged opening in its stone perimeter. Bonsor was looking. Inside, he found something he had not expected.

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Image: Andrew Abbott | CC BY-SA 2.0

Obadiah's Barrow: What Lies Inside

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit David Lally, CC BY-SA 2.0. Scillonian entrance graves are a particular kind of monument, found in concentrated numbers in the Isles of Scilly and West Penwith Cornwall and almost nowhere else in Britain. They are low, circular mounds of earth and stones, edged with upright slabs and roofed by large coverin...

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Image: David Lally | CC BY-SA 2.0

Obadiah's Barrow: George Bonsor on Scilly

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Andrew Abbott, CC BY-SA 2.0. George Edward Bonsor Saint Martin was an unusual figure in the archaeology of his era - born in Lille to an English father, raised by relatives in England, and trained as a painter at the Académie Royale des Beaux-Arts in Brussels before turning to archaeology in Spain. By 1901 h...

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Image: Andrew Abbott | CC BY-SA 2.0

Obadiah's Barrow: Five Graves on One Hill

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Andrew Abbott, CC BY-SA 2.0. Obadiah's Barrow is the largest of the five entrance graves clustered on Kittern Hill. Around them lie fourteen Bronze Age cairns - smaller burial or memorial mounds - linked by the low banks of a prehistoric field system. The relationship between cairns and graves is not yet und...

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Image: Andrew Abbott | CC BY-SA 2.0

Obadiah's Barrow: Above the Atlantic, Still There

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Andrew Abbott, CC BY-SA 2.0. Obadiah's Barrow is still in its place on the slope of Kittern Hill. The rat eradication that cleared Gugh and St Agnes between 2013 and 2017 was also, in part, a habitat restoration around the archaeology - the volunteers who later removed invasive pittosporum from the seabird b...

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Image: Andrew Abbott | CC BY-SA 2.0