Cairn with a cist near Plym Steps

This is a cairn, a burial mound built in the Bronze Age, probably between 1500 and 1000 BC. Within it lies a cist, a stone-built chamber that would once have held human remains and grave goods. Like many such monuments scattered across Dartmoor, it marks a place of the dead from an age when the moor was more heavily settled and farmed than it is today.

Today you will find a low earthen mound, its interior stones visible if exposed by time and weather. It stands in open moorland near Plym Steps, where the river narrows and was once crossed on foot. Visiting means walking into a landscape that has held these monuments for over three thousand years.