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Main image: Shell Top - 11 metres from location - image by jeff collins (CC BY-SA 2.0), via Wikimedia Commons
Historic England's scheduling record (list entry 1011955) describes a cairn built around the granite outcrop on the summit of Shell Top. It is a mound of small boulders 16.5 metres across and 1.4 metres high, with the natural outcrop of the tor rising a further 1.4 metres. A triangular cavity between the blocks of the tor, 2.5 by 1.5 metres and 0.8 metres deep, is considered natural. It lies in the parish of Shaugh Prior, about 1.6 km south of Hen Tor and 3.3 km north-east of Lee Moor.
Historic England puts most of Dartmoor's funerary monuments in the Bronze Age, about 2500 to 500 BC, and describes cairns as mounds of earth or stone piled over a burial, sometimes with a small rectangular stone chest, or cist, a kerb of stones round the edge and a ditch.
Sources: Historic England list entry 1011955, which cites the Devon County Sites and Monuments Register (SX 56 SE-062).
- Period: Bronze Age
- Status: Scheduled monument (Historic England list entry 1011955)
- Grid reference: SX 5975 6379 (approximate, from the listing's coordinates)
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