Just over 1,300 years ago, according to his hagiographer Felix, St Guthlac did something until then unrecorded in England; he went to live in a burial mound. When Guthlac came to the fen ‘island’ of Crowland, seeking a hermit's life, he found:

Felix, therefore, states only that the mound was artificial; it is with archaeological hindsight that we can be virtually certain that it was a barrow. His statement appears to be the earliest extant reference to grave-robbing in England; however, some Anglo-Saxon charter bounds mention ‘the barrow which was dug into’, and ‘the broken barrow’, so perhaps the tradition that mounds contained treasure, and some attempts to recover it, began quite early in Anglo-Saxon England.

A metal sign to the south of Crowland abbey church announcing ‘Site of St Guthlac's Cell’ marks where later tradition placed it, and where the rector thought he had found it in 1908. This is no longer accepted; though it is usually believed that the cell must have been close to the present church no burial mound is known there. Another possibility is that Guthlac's cell was about 500 m to the north-east of the church, on a site known as Anchorite (or variations thereon) Hill, where a later medieval ‘chapel’ (so-called) apparently overlay a Bronze Age barrow, and was surrounded by an enclosure ditch, as can be seen on air photographs. This is near where a stone has recently (April 1999) been placed, as was shown on local television, when it was stated that this was the site of Guthlac's cell. The inscription on the stone is more circumspect, and Guthlac's establishment evidently had several cells, so that it might have been one of the others which was originally on Anchorite Hill.

Along the axis of the Crowland gravel peninsula other Bronze Age barrows are known, but they have yielded only ‘rude pottery … cinerary urns (including Roman ware) … flint spearheads’ and the like – hardly enough, it would seem, to have tempted treasure seekers.