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Antiquities

Three cairns forming the westernmost part of a cairnfield on Longstone Hill

Devon

These three cairns are the westernmost monuments in a larger cairnfield that spreads across Longstone Hill. Built during the Bronze Age, they are part of a pattern of burial and ritual monuments that punctuate Dartmoor's high ground. Like many of the moor's cairns, they would have served as burial places or territorial markers for the communities that inhabited this exposed landscape thousands of years ago.

Today the cairns remain as weathered stone heaps on the open moorland. Visiting them means walking out onto the hill itself, where the relationship between these monuments and the wider landscape becomes clear. They are humble structures, but their presence across Dartmoor speaks to a deep human history on the moor, and to the enduring mark that Bronze Age peoples left on this place.

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Photo: Guy Wareham (CC BY-SA 2.0) via Wikimedia Commons

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