Cist near Skir Ford

This scheduled monument consists of a cairn, a mound of stones heaped over a burial, with a stone cist (burial chamber) at its centre. The site dates to the Bronze Age, when such structures were built across Dartmoor as permanent markers for the dead. The cist would originally have held human remains, and the cairn served both as a practical mound and as a visible monument in the landscape.

Today the site remains much as it has for millennia, a modest stone heap on open moor. It is one of hundreds of Bronze Age burial monuments scattered across Dartmoor, evidence of the communities who lived and died here over three thousand years ago. The location, high on moorland southeast of Skir Ford, offers a sense of the upland world these people inhabited.