have also been designed to share the skyline with two other nearby monuments, Arbor Low stone circle and Gib Hill barrow. The seventh-century Peak District was a small buffer state between Mercia and Northumbria, occupied, according to the Tribal Hidage, by the Anglo-Saxon Pecsæte. The area came under the fold of the Mercian kingdom around the eighth century; the Benty Grange and other rich barrows suggest that the Pecsæte may have had their own dynasty beforehand, but there is no written evidence for this. Excavation Bateman excavated the barrow on 3 May 1848. Although he did not mention it in his account, he was likely not the first person to dig up the grave. The fact that the objects were found in two clusters separated by , and that other objects that normally accompany a helmet were absent, such as a sword and shield, suggests that the grave had previously been looted. Being so large it may alternatively or additionally have contained two burials, only one of which was discovered by Bateman. The barrow comprises a circular central mound approximately in diameter and high, an encircling fosse about wide and deep, and outer penannular earthworks around wide and high. The entire structure measures approximately . Bateman suggested a body once lay at its centre, flat against the original surface of the soil; what he described as the one remnant, strands of hair, is now thought to be from a cloak of fur, cowhide or something similar. The recovered objects were found in two clusters. One cluster was found in the area of the supposed hair, the other about to the west. In the former area Bateman described "a curious assemblage of ornaments", which were difficult to remove successfully from the hardened earth. This included a cup identified as leather but probably of wood, approximately in diameter at the mouth. Its rim was edged with silver, while its surface was "decorated by four wheel-shaped ornaments and two crosses of thin silver, affixed by pins of the same metal, clenched inside". Also found were the remnants of three hanging bowl escutcheons, as well as "a knot of very fine wire", and some "thin bone variously ornamented with lozenges &c." attached to silk, but that soon decayed when exposed to air. Approximately to the west of the other objects was found a jumbled mass of ironwork. Separated, this mass included a collection of