What is a cairn?

What a cairn is

Historic England dates round cairns to the Bronze Age, about 2000 to 700 BC; they cover one or more burials, sometimes in stone-lined compartments called cists, and some have a kerb of larger stones around the edge. Ring cairns are low, wide circular banks of stones around an open central area, and platform cairns are low, roughly level platforms of stones retained by a kerb. Clearance cairns are irregular heaps of stones from clearing land for farming, and a group of cairns is called a cairnfield; some clearance cairns of prehistoric date contain burials, so a cairnfield cannot be assumed to be recent. Cairns are a common feature of the uplands, often in prominent positions on summits and ridges.

How cairns look on LiDAR

A burial cairn shows as a low circular rise, often with a hollow in the centre where it has been dug into or robbed for stone, and a ring cairn shows as a low ring with a level centre. A local relief model shows these low features best on open moorland, and positive openness emphasises the edges of kerbs and banks. Many cairns are only 0.2 to 0.5 metres high and a few metres across, close to the limit of what a 1-metre terrain model can show, so small clearance cairns may appear only as a scatter of faint bumps.

See LiDAR visualisations explained for what each method shows.

What can look like one

Natural boulder spreads, rock outcrops, sheepfolds, collapsed walls, quarry waste and modern walkers' marker cairns can look like prehistoric cairns. Ring cairns are often mistaken for stone circles and for the footings of round houses.

Protection

Many burial cairns and some cairnfields are scheduled monuments, protected in England by the Ancient Monuments and Archaeological Areas Act 1979 and in Wales by the Historic Environment (Wales) Act 2023.

Examples on the LiDAR

Where they are

Counties with the most cairns that have a page here.

More examples