Round barrow on North Hessary Tor

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 regional background, “British barrows”, is given below.

No scientific date has been published for this site. Monuments of this type in United Kingdom are generally dated 4000 BCE to 800 BCE; the site itself may fall inside or outside that range.

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.