He recounts joining a reprisal party in the mid-1860s, while mayor, for the killers of a shepherd: "They got on top of a big mound & defied us & smacked their buttocks at us & hurled large stones down on us, & hid themselves behind large trees and huge rocks but some of them paid dearly for their bravado.
Beneath the thin grass topsoil, it is possible to make out the layers from the bottom: heaped clay and chalk to form a mound, then large flints and rocks, and the top layer of smaller stones and gravel.
You can get a good sense of the central valley's layout from atop touristy Mount Ainslie, but for a different perspective, scale Red Hill, a scrub-covered mound after which one of the city's most affluent suburbs is named.
All around the chancellor, the kitchen is abuzz with activity – wife Maggie rustling up the teas and coffees, special adviser Catherine trying to stare her BlackBerry into submission, and Darling's daughter, Anna, perched on the windowseat, peeking at a mound of newspapers.
The artist proposed the construction of a 61m (200ft) spiralling Neolithic mound in east Yorkshire to represent the UK's ancient history.
His images also featured a lake, farmhouse and fluffy white clouds, all of which appeared in the opening ceremony alongside a spiralling mound said to represent Glastonbury Tor.
Gugh, an island joined to St Agnes by a sandbar and reached only at low tide, has two: Obadiah's Barrow (6), a prehistoric burial mound, and a standing stone, the Old Man of Gugh (7).
Gudhjem's smokery is the traditional home of the Bornholm speciality Sol over Gudhjem: a smoked herring fillet on rye bread, topped with radish, dill, a little mound of salt, and a raw egg yolk.
Then I realise: the female is half the nest, an enormous mound of mottled brown feathers.
But the animals have never been seen to build a mound in the way that beavers, say, build dams to control rivers.
Gophers live for merely a few years, but a mound can take half a millennium to form.
