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Main image: Photo: Herbythyme, Wikimedia Commons
This scheduled monument comprises a cairn cemetery and earthwork bank situated in the open moorland south west of Blackaton Brook Ford. The site dates to the Bronze Age, when the higher ground of Dartmoor was more intensively settled and used for burial and ritual purposes. Cairns like these served as communal or family burial monuments, and their presence across the moor marks a period of significant activity on these uplands.
Today the site forms part of the complex palimpsest of Bronze Age remains scattered across Dartmoor. A visitor walking across this moorland landscape will find the cairns and associated earthwork bank as subtle features in the terrain, best understood as part of the wider pattern of prehistoric settlement that shaped the moor we see today.
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Plate from Dartmoor Illustrated, page 108, 1900“The only thing that brought us home on long summer evenings was the ring of a handbell by Mum standing at the field gate calling us in for supper.”
Also on Our DartmoorBetsy Grimbal's Tower — A Grade I listed tower adjoining the former vicarage, a distinctive landmark on Dartmoor's slopes.
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