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Cairns & Barrows

A cairn cemetery on Long Ridge

Grid ref: SX 6438 8611

Main image: Photo: Richard Knights, Wikimedia Commons

This scheduled monument comprises a group of burial cairns spread across Long Ridge, likely built during the Bronze Age when Dartmoor's higher ground was actively settled and used. The cairns are modest stone structures, their origins and purpose revealed through their pattern across the landscape rather than individual scale. They represent a significant phase in Dartmoor's human history, when the moor supported a more substantial population than in later centuries.

Today the site remains as scattered stone heaps set into the moorland, best understood as a group rather than as individual features. Walking across Long Ridge, visitors encounter them as part of the complex and layered history of the moor itself, where Bronze Age communities left their mark on the open high ground. The setting offers views across Dartmoor's characteristic terrain and reveals how these ancient people chose to place their dead within the landscape they inhabited.

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“Nor can imagination body forth a place more congenial to the sights and sounds of dark and blood-stained rites, than this dreary, narrow, rock-strewn glen of the Dart.”

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