Swanborough Tump

The Tump was also known as ‘Swanborough Ash’ because three ash trees grew on it (the name is in a document from 1764). Katy Jordan records in her ‘Haunted Landscape’ book that during the 1970s when she lived in the Pewsey Vale, the Swanborough ‘Team of Parishes’ used a picture of the tump as their emblem – it was the mound and the legendary three ash trees (there were a few more than three trees there when I visited:). It’s interesting that the site is now being used as a Christian symbol: the three trees on the mound are likened to the three crosses on the mound of Golgotha. Just part of the continued evolution of the site’s meaning to local people, I suppose.