Two Bronze Age burial mounds on a St Mary's hillside above Crow Sound, the upper one ranking among Scilly's best-kept entrance graves
Open accessfree to visit at any reasonable time
Standing remainssubstantial fabric survives to stand in front of
Two burial mounds lie on this stretch of hillside above St Mary’s, looking north across Crow Sound towards the smaller islands. Both are entrance graves, a style of tomb found almost nowhere outside Scilly and the far west of Cornwall. Each is a round mound of earth held in by a stone kerb, built over a stone-lined chamber reached through a short passage. People raised them in the Bronze Age, and unlike on the mainland, kept using them long after burial customs elsewhere had moved on to individual graves.
The upper mound, known as Innisidgen Carn, keeps its shape better than most of its kind on the islands. A passage on its east side leads into a chamber roofed with four hefty granite slabs, itself capped by a fifth stone over the entrance. About ninety metres away to the north-west, the lower mound has fared worse, down to two surviving capstones, though the same layout is still readable underneath. Both graves were empty by the time anyone got inside them in modern times, with no clue to who was buried there or when the remains disappeared.
The climb up here is free, any day of the year. Bant’s Carn and Halangy Down, another Bronze Age burial chamber paired with an Iron Age village, is a short walk west, and the wider Isles of Scilly are all around you from up here.
