Bant's Carn Burial Chamber & Halangy Down Ancient Village

Visitor Guide

Bant's Carn and Halangy Down lie on the north-western corner of St Mary's, reached by a footpath or cycle track rather than by road, so a visit here forms part of a wider walk rather than a quick roadside stop. Most visitors set out from Hugh Town, following the coast path north-west along the island's western shore before climbing gently to the site.

From the burial chamber at Bant's Carn, the terraced houses of Halangy Down spread out just below on the hillside, close enough to explore both sites in a single visit. The setting is exceptional: on a clear day the views stretch out across the sea to Tresco, Bryher, Samson and the other islands of the archipelago, giving a real sense of why this raised, exposed hilltop was chosen for a burial monument intended to be seen from far around.

Allow around an hour to explore both sites properly, longer if continuing along the coast path to the Innisidgen burial chambers a little further north-east, a popular way to link several of St Mary's prehistoric monuments into one longer walk. There are no facilities at the site itself; Hugh Town, a couple of miles away, has the island's main shops, cafes, pubs and the Isles of Scilly Museum.

History

Bant's Carn is a Bronze Age entrance grave, a distinctive type of monument found almost exclusively on the Isles of Scilly and in Cornwall's Penwith peninsula, built around 2500 BC when the islands of Scilly were still joined into a single larger landmass by land now lost beneath the sea. The tomb's design is characteristic of the type: an outer platform surrounding an inner mound, itself built over a slab-lined chamber that would originally have been entirely hidden from view, its low, grass-covered profile giving little hint of the substantial structure beneath.

What sets Bant's Carn apart from many comparable Scillonian tombs is the scale of its chamber, at 17 feet long and up to 5 feet high, considerably taller than most entrance graves of this type, roofed by four enormous capstones and reached along a stone-lined entrance passage from the outer kerb. When the chamber was excavated in 1900, it proved to contain relatively modest remains for a monument of this size: four small piles of cremated human bone together with fragments of pottery, some of which appeared older than the burials themselves, hinting at a longer and more complex history of use than a single burial episode.

On the slope immediately below Bant's Carn lies Halangy Down, a settlement that tells a very different, much later story. Occupied during the Iron Age and into the Roman period, roughly the last few centuries BC through to a few centuries AD, the village endured as a working farming community for around five hundred years. Excavations carried out in the 1950s revealed eleven interconnecting stone-built houses, the majority simple oval structures typical of the islands, alongside one considerably larger courtyard house measuring 90 by 48 feet, with three internal rooms and a curved entrance passage that marks it out as characteristically Romano-British in style and status.

The people of Halangy Down farmed a mixed economy of cattle, sheep, pigs and horses, working the terraced field system whose banks and low stone walls are still traceable across roughly 330 yards of hillside today. A scatter of imported pottery recovered during excavation shows the settlement had some, if limited, contact with trade networks reaching beyond the islands into the wider Roman world, while a nearby cemetery of small funerary chambers, typical of the Romano-British period on Scilly, points to a community that continued its own older burial traditions even as farming life on the down went on. Today both Bant's Carn and Halangy Down are cared for by English Heritage, freely open to visitors as one of the most complete surviving prehistoric and Romano-British landscapes anywhere on the Isles of Scilly.

Important Features

• Bant's Carn chamber: an unusually tall Bronze Age entrance grave, roofed by four large capstones.
• The stone kerbs: two concentric rings of stone that once retained the mound covering the chamber.
• Halangy Down village: eleven interconnecting stone houses spanning the Iron Age to Roman period.
• The courtyard house: a large, three-roomed dwelling of Romano-British type, the settlement's most substantial building.
• The terraced field system: surviving banks and terraces from the community's farming landscape.
• Panoramic island views: sweeping outlooks across St Mary's to Tresco, Bryher and Samson.

Visitor Information

Things to Do Nearby

Frequently Asked Questions

Official English Heritage Site

For the latest access information, events and any temporary restrictions, check the official English Heritage page for Bant's Carn Burial Chamber and Halangy Down Ancient Village before you travel.

Visit the official English Heritage website