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Cairns & Barrows

Cairnfield near Cuckoo Rock

Grid ref: SX 5911 6878

Main image: Photo: Guy Wareham, Wikimedia Commons

This scheduled monument comprises a Bronze Age cairnfield with an associated enclosure, situated on open moorland east of Cuckoo Rock. The cairns are burial or clearance monuments typical of Dartmoor's prehistoric landscape, while the enclosure suggests settlement or pastoral use during the Bronze Age. Together they form part of the dense archaeological record of the high moor, where Bronze Age communities left extensive traces of their occupation across the granite uplands.

Today the site remains largely as fieldwork and aerial survey have recorded it, scattered across the moorland surface. For visitors, it rewards careful walking and observation, particularly in low light when earthworks cast shadows that make ancient features more legible. The site sits within one of Dartmoor's richest prehistoric zones, where multiple monuments cluster across the landscape and tell of sustained human use of the high moor over many centuries.

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Devils elbowDevils elbow. Photograph by Glavind Strachan Photography

“'Way, these here pisgies be a makin' sich a rattle that I want put up wi't no more. I'll zee what they he up to; I can zee mun droo the 'all in the planchin'.”

Also on Our DartmoorRingmoor Down cairn, first of three — A cairn 5 m across and 0.4 m high with a possible kerb and a shallow central hollow, one of three on Ringmoor Down within 40 m of the Eylesbarrow reave.

Dartmoor quiz

Which Dartmoor place has also been known as "the Ring Road"?

Okehampton Range: Observation Post 15, Okement Hill. The Circular Road, also called the Ring Road, was open to public vehicles until 2009 and gave much quicker access to places such as Cranmere Pool.

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