The Tumulus

Stop eighteen. The tumulus, which the whole of north London calls Boudica's grave.

It is a round mound, about thirty-six metres across and three metres high, ringed with railings and padlocked, with trees growing out of the top of it. It is a scheduled ancient monument, which is the same legal protection given to Stonehenge.

The story is that the queen of the Iceni was buried here after her defeat by the Romans in about the year sixty one. It is a wonderful story and there is no evidence for it whatsoever. It seems to have been attached to the mound in the nineteenth century by people who wanted it to be true, which is also how Boudica came to be buried under a platform at King's Cross, in another story that is equally popular and equally baseless.

In eighteen ninety four the British Museum sent Charles Hercules Read to dig it, in front of a considerable crowd. He cut into it, found some charcoal, and found nothing else at all. His conclusion was that anything buried here would have dissolved in the acid soil long ago, which is honest, and which settles nothing.

So it is probably a Bronze Age burial mound, three and a half thousand years old, sitting between a running track and a swimming pond. Or it is the base of a seventeenth-century windmill, which is the other serious theory and a considerably worse afternoon out.

Free, and you cannot go in, and neither can anybody else.

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