MSO6252 - Bronze Age Burial Cairn on Dunkery Hill (Monument)

This cairn or "beacon" is not specially named. There is a considerable hole at the top in which a few bushes grow and a conical pile of stones about 3.5 feet in height can be seen on the top. The diameter of the exposed stones is about 72 feet and the cairn's height above the moor is about 6 foot. [1] The cairn is 25 paces diameter and 6.5 feet high (Wootton Courtenay 1). It is surrounded by a series of quarry pits which may have yielded part of the cairn material. [2] In good condition. [3] Scheduled under "Burial Mounds". [4] Considerable hole at the top of the pile. Conical pile of stones rise from the top, about 3.5 feet. [5] A large cairn lies on Dunkery Hill at SS 90813 42666, some 100 metres southwest of Robin How (MSO6251). It comprises a circular mound of small and medium angular stones 24 metres in diameter and 1.8 metres high. A heather covered bank 1 metre wide encloses this stony mound. Several quarry pits to the east and south supplied material for the cairn. The cairn has been disturbed in the recent past as it is now flat-topped, not as described by source 3. The evidence for this being the site of a beacon comes from the OS 25 inch First edition map [7], there is no other evidence that this was the case. The cairn was surveyed using differential GPS as part of the RCHME East Exmoor Project. [6] The Scheduled Monument Condition Assessment of 2009 gave the site a survival score of 3. [8] The site was surveyed in April 2015 as part of the 2015 Exmoor Scheduled Monument Condition Assessment. It was given a survival score of 3. [9] The cairn is shown and labelled on 2020 MasterMap data. [10]