Tucked away on a path through Thetford Forest sits an oval shaped mound with a hugely evocative name - Blood Hill.

And archaeologists have been making fresh discoveries about this secluded site, which is only about a mile away from the much better-known Grimes Graves prehistoric flint mine.

Grimes GravesGrimes Graves (Image: Mike Page)

Blood Hill, which has also been known at various times as Bloody Knoll and Haye Meer, is actually a Bronze Age barrow.

Measuring 29 metres by 40 metres and rising to a height of half a metre, it is a funerary monument which is probably some 4,000 years old.

Experts at Historic England recently used a ground-penetrating radar to learn more about the site, which was given scheduled monument status in 1927.

They have established that, while the mound visible today is shaped like a lozenge, it covers an earlier circular barrow mound.

And surveys also suggest the barrow was originally higher, potentially having been flattened through deliberate landscape reshaping, erosion, or through cutting into the mound.

The geophysical fieldwork was conducted by Megan Clements, Neil Linford, Paul Linford, Andrew Payne and Nathalie Barrett.

There are more than 10,000 bowl barrows recorded nationally, with most dating to the period between 2400 to 1500BC.

They were built as rubble or earthen mounds, covering single or multiple burials.

Sometimes they were surrounded by ditches, as is the case with Blood Hill, although that has been filled in.

An image of Blood Hill captured using LiDAR - laser mapping technologyAn image of Blood Hill captured using LiDAR - laser mapping technology (Image: Crown Copyright - Forest Research)

The mound is incorporated into a boundary banks, probably of medieval to post-medieval date which marked the parish boundary between Lynford and Thetford.

Various prehistoric worked flints have been found in the immediate vicinity of the Blood Hill barrow and on the land to the east.

That includes arrowheads, a crude axe, flint blades, a thumbnail scraper and what was tentatively identified as a dagger.

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The origin of the names - Blood Hill, Bloody Knoll and Haye Meer - are not clear, although the first two could be based on a belief that battles had taken place on the site.