Pont-y-Llan, Cairn

Round barrows are among the commonest prehistoric monuments in Britain. A round barrow is a hemispherical mound of earth or stone raised over one or more burials, often ringed by a ditch or a bank. In Britain most were built between about 2200 and 1100 BCE, from the Late Neolithic to the Late Bronze Age. Antiquarians sorted them into bowl, bell, saucer and disc forms according to the shape of the mound and the ditch, and the types still appear on archaeological maps. Under the mound there may be a cist, a pit grave, or cremated bone in a pottery vessel; later graves were often cut into older mounds, sometimes thousands of years after the first burial. The full article, “British barrows”, follows below under About this kind of monument.

Typological estimate, not a date for this site: monuments of this kind in this region are normally dated 4000 BCE to 800 BCE. The range comes from what is known about megalithic mound monuments in United Kingdom; nothing measured on this site itself is on record, so it may be younger or older than the range suggests.

The range rests on this regional background (source: the Wikipedia article “Tumulus”): British barrows of many types were in use from the late Neolithic until the end of the Bronze Age (2900-800 BC); megalithic construction in England is placed at c. 4000 BC.