Cairns near Penn Beacon

This cairn is one of two surviving Bronze Age burial monuments sited close together on the high ground west of Penn Beacon. These stone mounds were built over thousands of years ago to mark the graves of prominent members of prehistoric communities who lived and herded on Dartmoor's uplands. The cairn survives today as a low mound of stone, weathered by centuries of moorland exposure.

Walking across this part of Dartmoor, you encounter the cairn in its proper setting, isolated on open moor where Bronze Age people would have known it as a landmark and a place of burial significance. The site forms part of the dense archaeological landscape of prehistoric Dartmoor, where cairns, stone circles and settlement remains tell the story of human occupation stretching back four thousand years.