The four criteria for assessing class importance apply to long barrows as follows:

Period (currency): Long -lived. The tradition of constructing and using long barrows seems to have spanned a period of five or six centuries, although individual barrows may not have been used over such a long period.

Rarity: Common. About 500 long barrows have been recorded in England to date, widely scattered although with major concentrations in central southern England.

Diversity (form): Very high. At least eight main types of long barrow can be identified on the basis of chamber form and the position of the chambers within the mound. There are also numerous regional variations in the manner of construction, much of which can be accounted for by differences in the kinds of building materials available.

Period (representativity): Very high. There are relatively few classes of monument distinctive of the middle Neolithic period. The human remains contained in long barrows represents the single most important sources of information about the demography of middle Neolithic communities.

Assigning scores to these criteria following the system set out in the Monument Evaluation Manual, long barrows yield a Class Importance Value of 52. This lies towards the upper end of the range of possible values (max.= 64), emphasizing the great age, diversity, and representativity of this class of monument. Examples representing the full range of types, and variations in size and orientation, must be included in the sample of nationally important long barrows.