Details

The monument includes a cairn containing a cist, situated on a gentle north
east facing slope of Skir Hill overlooking the valley of the O Brook. The
cairn survives as a 4.1m diameter ring of edge set slabs standing up to 0.5m
high. The cist is situated slightly west of the cairn's centre and survives
as a 0.82m long by 0.52m wide and 0.82m deep stone lined pit, having been
revealed by past excavation.

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.

Source: Historic England

Reasons for Scheduling

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 cist and cairn 590m SSE of Skir Ford survive
well and will contain environmental and archaeological information relating to
the monument and the landscape in which it was constructed. Deep peat
deposits in and around the monument represent a particularly good source of
information for the contemporary environment.

Source: Historic England

Sources

Books and journals
Butler, J, 'Dartmoor Atlas of Antiquities - The North' in Dartmoor Atlas of Antiquities, , Vol. 4, (1993), 203

Source: Historic England