Combe, Berkshire
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Combe is a village and civil parish in the English county of Berkshire. It is situated in the district of West Berkshire, on the top of the downs near Walbury Hill and Combe Gibbet, overlooking the village of Inkpen and the valley of the River Kennet. Before 1895, Combe was in Hampshire.
Bronze Age people used communal 'long barrows' to bury their dead and one still exists directly beneath the Gibbet at Combe. Both male and female bodies of the dead may have been left in the open to be reduced to skeletons by carrion before being collected and buried. In many cases the corpses were carefully assembled with the head to the south, men facing east, women facing west. It is unknown whether this was the case in the so-called 'Inkpen' long barrow (named after the village to the north), though it is on an east-west alignment.
