Barrow Clump, on the east side of the Avon valley, lies in the centre of the Salisbury Plain Military Training Area. It is the site of a large, partly extant Early Bronze Age burial mound which incorporates an earlier Beaker funerary monument, seals a Neolithic land surface, and was the focus of an Anglo-Saxon cemetery, most of the 70 graves dating to the 6th century AD.

Excavations in 2003 4 were carried out largely in response to the damage being caused to this and other prehistoric monuments by badgers. The subsequent work in 2012 14 was made possible by the participation of Operation Nightingale (Exercise Beowulf), an innovative military initiative to involve injured service personnel in archaeology to aid their recovery.