General view of the barrow
	The cattle bone deposit
	The primary burial within the central grave pit

At Gayhurst quarry, near Newport Pagnell and adjacent to both the M1 motorway and the River Great Ouse, trial trenching showed that six of the barrows had been ploughed flat by the medieval period. However, the largest, a double-ditched barrow 34m in diameter, which lay at the centre of the cemetery, still survived as a low earthwork and was well preserved although recent decades of ploughing had just removed the mound and the central area was suffering regular plough damage. In addition, a side branch of the river was realigning itself and cutting further into the barrow,posing a longer-term threat. The barrow was therefore vunerable to further plough damage if extraction did not go ahead, while if extraction went ahead it could have been preserved on a narrow berm between the river that was eroding it and the open quarry. The planning archaeologist for Milton Keynes, Brian Giggins, decided that extraction could not be stopped given the poor preservation of six of the barrows, but that leaving the well-preserved barrow in such a vulnerable location did not constitute meaningful long-term preservation. He therefore called for the open area excavation of all seven barrows in advance of gravel extraction, and the results have justified this decision.

The six smaller ring ditches produced meagre results, with cremation burials surviving in only two. Meanwhile, at the centre of the largest barrow there was a massive grave pit, 3.5m long and 1.45m deep, with a sequence of five successive burials. An extended inhumation of an adult man within an oak-lined chamber, accompanied by only a foreleg of a small pig, was followed by an unurned cremation, a crouched inhumation burial within a small chamber accompanied by two plano-convex knives and a red-deer antler, a second unurned cremation and, finally, a cremation within a collared urn that had been damaged by ploughing. Radiocarbon dating places the burials between c 2100 and c 1900 cal BC, while the six satellite barrows date to 1800 to 1500 cal BC.

However, what made this barrow remarkable was a deposit of cattle bones, perhaps containing the remains of 600 animals. The cattle bone was found spilling down the inner edge of the inner ditch mixed with clean gravel, suggesting that it had been dragged down from the surface of the gravel capped mound. It appears to have been buried and hidden before the outer ditch was dug and the mound enlarged with a second gravel deposit. The splitting and surface erosion of the bones showed that they had been exposed to the elements on the surface of the central mound for some time before this.

The absence of bone from the central grave showed that they had not been mounded up as part of a central cairn, as occurred with another exceptional cattle bone deposit at a near contemporary barrow at Irthlingborough, Northamptonshire adjacent to the River Nene. Another difference was that the Irthlingborough deposit comprised largely skulls, while at Gayhurst all of the major bones are present in some quantity. The assessment of the bone from one of the six excavated lengths of the ditch shows a preference for bones bearing high meat yields, the upper limb bones and the pelvis. This suggests that while some animals were probably slaughtered at the site, parts of others were arriving as prime cuts of meat from animals aged between 18 and 30 months slaughtered elsewhere.

A total of 183kg of bone, occupying 50 archive boxes, were recovered from the excavation of about a third of the inner ditch. The sample examined so far contains the remains of more than 30 cattle, and extrapolating for the entire ditch circuit gives a figure of around 600 animals. Whether this represents a single massive feast or a more gradual accumulation over many years has not been determined. But, in either case, the overall scale of the bone deposit provides as vivid an indicator of the wealth of the community that could afford to make this exceptional statement as the deposition of any number of artefacts. This barrow therefore provides an interesting contrast to the material wealth exhibited by the well-publicised Amesbury Archer. Together they illustrate the complexity and diversity of burial rites in the late Neolithic/early Bronze Age, and the difficultly of interpreting these without projecting modern concepts of wealth onto cultures that are likely to have held quite different values.