Cairn and cist on Barn Hill, 840m north east of Moortown Farm

Reasons for Designation

Dartmoor is the largest expanse of open moorland in southern Britain and, because of exceptional conditions of preservation, it is also one of the most complete examples of an upland relict landscape in the whole country. The great wealth and diversity of archaeological remains provide direct evidence for human exploitation of the Moor from the early prehistoric period onwards. The well-preserved and often visible relationship between settlement sites, major land boundaries, trackways, ceremonial and funerary monuments as well as later industrial remains, gives significant insights into successive changes in the pattern of land use through time. Cists are small rectangular stone structures used for burial purposes and date to the Bronze Age. On Dartmoor they are made up of regular stone slabs forming a box-like structure sometimes topped by a larger coverstone. Short cists survive as free-standing monuments, with no enclosing stone and earth cairn. On Dartmoor cists are also associated with cairns, ring cairns and cairnfield groups, but these free-standing examples form a separate group in their own right. Their longevity, having been in use for a millennium or so, provides insight into the range of ceremonial and ritual practices of the contemporary farming communities. The Dartmoor examples provide one of the best preserved and most dense concentrations of this class of monument in south-western Britain and, as such, a high proportion of surviving examples are considered worthy of protection.

Despite partial excavation, the cairn and cist on Barn Hill, 840m north east of Moortown Farm survive well and will contain environmental and archaeological information relating to the monument and the landscape in which it was constructed. This monument lies within a coaxial field system and forms part of a particularly well-preserved palimpsest on Whitchurch Common, containing abundant evidence for the use of the area in both prehistoric and historic times.

Details

The monument includes a cairn containing a cist situated on a gentle south facing slope of Barn Hill overlooking the valley of the River Walkham. The cairn survives as a 5.7m diameter mound standing up to 0.2m high. The cist is situated slightly south of the cairn's centre and survives as a 0.98m long by 0.6m wide and 0.3m deep stone lined pit. The base of the cist is level with the present ground surface and the side stones protrude 0.3m high above this. This monument sits within an extensive coaxial field system which extends over much of Whitchurch Common and the slopes of Cox Tor, and forms the subject of separate schedulings

MAP EXTRACT The site of the monument is shown on the attached map extract. It includes a 2 metre boundary around the archaeological features, considered to be essential for the monument's support and preservation.

Legacy

The contents of this record have been generated from a legacy data system.

Legacy System number:

22367

Legacy System:

RSM

Sources

Books and journals
Butler, J, Dartmoor Atlas of Antiquities, (1994), 34

End of official list entry

All text content is available under the Open Government Licence v3.0 , except where otherwise stated. Any supplied maps are © Crown Copyright [and database rights] 2026 OS AC0000815036 and may not be reproduced without permission.