Cairn with cist west of Legis Lake

This is a scheduled monument from the Bronze Age, consisting of a cairn, a mound of stones, with a cist or stone burial chamber at its centre. Such structures dot Dartmoor and speak to the presence of settled communities on the moor thousands of years ago. The cist would have held the remains of the dead, carefully placed and covered with stone.

Today the site sits on open moorland west of Legis Lake, part of the broader landscape of prehistoric activity that gives Dartmoor its distinctive character. Walking here, you encounter the work of ancient hands: evidence of how people lived, died and were remembered on these high granite slopes long before the medieval settlements that followed.