Three bowl barrows on Lympstone Common, 500m west of Fryingpans

Listed on the National Heritage List for England. Search over 400,000 listed places

Overview

Heritage Category:: Scheduled Monument
List Entry Number:: 1020014
Date first listed:: 28-Aug-2001

The Missing Pieces Project

Share your view of unique places.

Add your contribution

Location

Location of this list entry and nearby places that are also listed. Use our map search to find more listed places.

This map is for quick reference purposes only and may not be to scale.

What is the National Heritage List for England?

The National Heritage List for England is a unique register of our country's most significant historic buildings and sites. The places on the list are protected by law and most are not open to the public.

The list includes:

🏠 Buildings
🏰 Scheduled monuments
🌳 Parks and gardens
⚔️ Battlefields
⚓ Shipwrecks

Find out more about listing

Historic England Archive

Search over 1 million photographs and drawings from the 1850s to the present day using our images archive.

Find Photos

Official list entry

Heritage Category:: Scheduled Monument
List Entry Number:: 1020014
Date first listed:: 28-Aug-2001

Location

The building or site itself may lie within the boundary of more than one authority.

County:: Devon
District:: East Devon (District Authority)
Parish:: Lympstone
National Grid Reference:: SY 03165 85078

Reasons for Designation

Bowl barrows, the most numerous form of round barrow, are funerary monuments dating from the Late Neolithic period to the Late Bronze Age, with most examples belonging to the period 2400-1500 BC. They were constructed as earthen or rubble mounds, sometimes ditched, which covered single or multiple burials. They occur either in isolation or grouped as cemeteries and often acted as a focus for burials in later periods. Often superficially similar, although differing widely in size, they exhibit regional variations in form and a diversity of burial practices. There are over 10,000 surviving bowl barrows recorded nationally (many more have already been destroyed), occurring across most of lowland Britain. Often occupying prominent locations, they are a major historic element in the modern landscape and their considerable variation of form and longevity as a monument type provide important information on the diversity of beliefs and social organisations amongst early prehistoric communities. They are particularly representative of their period and a substantial proportion of surviving examples are considered worthy of protection.

The group of three bowl barrows on Lympstone Common survives well in association with a number of other recorded barrows in the vicinity. The barrows will retain archaeological information about the monument and the landscape in which it was constructed.

Details

The monument includes three bowl barrows aligned almost exactly east-west and situated between 8m and 9m apart on Lympstone Common. The barrows lie on flat ground close to the 150m contour above the south facing slope of the common, which commands views down to the coast at Budleigh Salterton. A number of other barrows in the vicinity are the subject of separate schedulings. All three barrows have clear bowl-shaped profiles. The central barrow mound is 1.5m in height whilst the flanking barrow mounds are 2m in height. They vary in diameter between 7.7m and 8m. All have an associated and encircling ditch from which material would have been quarried for the construction of the mounds. The encircling quarry ditches vary in width between 1.4m and 2m. These ditches have become partly infilled over the millennia although they are all well defined as depressions surrounding their respective mounds and vary in depth between 0.2m and 0.65m. The easternmost barrow has a trench cut into its centre from the south, which may be the result of antiquarian activity. The barrows lie adjacent to the parish boundary between Lympstone and Woodbury, this boundary being defined at one stage by a low earthen bank. The barrows may have provided a clearly recognisable and already ancient reference point in the landscape at the time that the parish boundaries were defined in the early medieval period.

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:: 33032
Legacy System:: RSM

Sources

Other
Hutchinson, P O, Diaries in Devon Record Office, 1872,

Legal

This monument is scheduled under the Ancient Monuments and Archaeological Areas Act 1979 as amended as it appears to the Secretary of State to be of national importance. This entry is a copy, the original is held by the Department for Culture, Media and Sport.