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.
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.
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.
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.
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