Locations of Cornish cairns in relation to the Rough Tor effect

ABSTRACT

Hundreds of round cairns and barrows survive on the granite uplands of Bodmin Moor, with hundreds more beyond the Moor, including along the Cornish coast. We posit that their distribution is far from random, or related merely to the territories of Late Neolithic and early Bronze Age people, especially as many Cornish cairns and barrows do not contain burials. Most of those in east Cornwall enjoy a direct sightline to Rough Tor, and Stowe’s Hill is visible from many of the remainder. Cairns were also built on Rough Tor itself. Siting cairns and barrows within the viewsheds of these sacred hills infers a late prehistoric acknowledgement of their ritual supremacy. The accretion of ceremonial monuments on these hills and in the viewshed of Rough Tor and, to a lesser degree, Stowe’s Hill shows that they had been sacred for millennia, from the Middle Neolithic onwards. The placing of cairns and barrows within the viewshed of these sacred hills is supported by the fact that in large areas of east Cornwall from which neither hill is visible there are few or no cairns or barrows, leading to barrow voids. In a very few cases, alternative sacred hills appear to have been sought.

KEYWORDS:

• Cairn
• barrow
• Bodmin Moor
• viewshed
• Bronze Age

Acknowledgments

Bryn Tapper supported Roger’s fieldwork with aspects of the spatial analyses, including the GIS viewshed modelling. The monument and site data used in the visibility analyses are curated by the Cornwall & Scilly Historic Environment Record, Cornwall Council. The LiDAR data are made available under the terms of the Open Government Licence by the Natural Environment Research Council. The 1:50,000 Land-Form PANORAMA elevation data are licensed from Ordnance Survey Open Source.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. The LiDAR data, captured in 2013, are a high-resolution (~1 point/metre) and high-accuracy (25 centimetres vertical) digital terrain model (DTM). They are made available under the terms of the Open Government Licence by the Natural Environment Research Council (Centre for Ecology & Hydrology; British Antarctic Survey; British Geological Survey) (see Ferraccioli et al. 2014).

2. Calculations performed as part of this test were undertaken using the computational tools available from the VassarStats website (http://www.vassarstats.net/).

3. The ‘off-moor’ Rough Tor viewshed was generated using modern Ordnance Survey Open Source 1:50,000 Land-Form PANORAMA® elevation data.