← Browse Cairns & Barrows · Browse the directory
Main image: Photo: Guy Wareham (CC BY-SA 2.0) via Wikimedia Commons
- Period: Bronze Age
- Status: Four scheduled monuments (Historic England entries listed below)
- Cairns: Six in all, 3.5 m to 15.5 m across, four with a stone cist
- Where: South, south-east and east-north-east of Down Tor
A round cairn is a mound of stones over a burial, and a cist is the stone-lined box inside it. Four scheduled monuments around Down Tor hold six cairns. Closest to the tor, 100 m south, is a small round cairn 4.3 m across whose centre has been dug out to show a cist 0.7 m long, 0.45 m wide and 0.5 m deep; its 1.8 m capstone lies displaced just to the south. Three small cairns 370 m east-north-east, in a valley between Down Tor and Hingston Hill, each hold a cist. The eastern one has a kerb of large edge-set stones and a cist 1.19 m by 0.71 m and 0.94 m deep; the western one is 6.25 m away; the third is an oval mound whose cist, 0.53 m long, is one of the smallest still in place on Dartmoor, and a leat 0.8 m wide runs between it and the western cairn.
Sixty metres south-east of the tor is a tor cairn, built against a granite outcrop: a horseshoe of edge-set stones, with two parallel lines 4.3 m long running from the rock. The biggest cairn here is on the saddle 615 m east-south-east, 15.5 m across and up to 1.5 m high, with a T-shaped trench cut into the centre; three small tin prospecting pits press against its edge.
The four scheduled monuments
| Historic England entry | Grid reference | What survives |
|---|---|---|
| 1008642 | SX 58031 69284 | A round cairn 4.3 m across and up to 0.3 m high with an opened cist (0.7 m by 0.45 m, 0.5 m deep) and a displaced 1.8 m capstone. |
| 1019573 | SX 58087 69367 | A tor cairn: a horseshoe of edge-set stones against a granite outcrop, two parallel lines 4.3 m long on the north and nine stones on a boulder on the south. |
| 1010782 | SX 58385 69567 | Three small round cairns, each with a cist: the eastern 4.5 m across with a kerb, the western 5 m across, and an oval one with one of Dartmoor's smallest cists. |
| 1009089 | SX 58640 69304 | A round cairn 15.5 m across and up to 1.5 m high with a T-shaped trench in the centre and three tin prospecting pits against its edge. |
Grid references are from the Historic England entries. Each entry covers one scheduled monument; a monument can hold several features.
Contact us if you have information about this listing
The 4 rings on this map are the separate scheduled monuments that make up this listing, placed from Historic England’s records. Tap a ring for its grid reference and a link to its official entry. The pin marks the middle of the group.
Official record
Explore the area
Go deeper with Dartefacts
Dartefacts is a database of Dartmoor sites with far more close-up detail than we can show here, and it is the best place to go deeper. Dartefacts is free to use, and nobody has to pay to look things up. If you want more, a yearly subscription adds 10-figure grid references, map zoom down to 1:25,000 and lists to tick off the places you have visited, and it helps keep the site going. We would encourage you to subscribe.
Thoughts
Be the first to share a thought about Round cairns around Down Tor.
Share a thoughtKnow another Dartmoor place, tor or landmark we should include? Suggest a listing, it is free.
Suggest a listing