Six further entrance graves and two low cairns lie on the same down as the largest of Scilly's Bronze Age tombs, above Porth Hellick Bay
Open accessfree to visit at any reasonable time
Standing remainssubstantial fabric survives to stand in front of
When this tomb was built, Scilly probably wasn’t several islands at all but one larger landmass with a fertile plain at its heart, since drowned as sea levels slowly rose over the following centuries. The burial chamber above Porth Hellick Bay is the largest of a cluster of Bronze Age entrance graves nearby, a type of tomb where a short, open passage leads into a stone-built chamber, with six further examples and two low cairns on the same down. An antiquarian named George Bonsor excavated it in 1899 and called it the Great Tomb — a mound about 12 metres across, its four massive capstones reached along a passage set at an angle to the chamber rather than running straight in.
The 1899 dig found the chamber already emptied of whatever had been buried there, leaving only a few scraps of Bronze Age pottery behind. Elsewhere on Scilly, similar entrance graves have turned up cremated bone and burial urns, suggesting the people who used tombs like this one cremated their dead rather than burying them whole, and kept doing so for centuries after most of mainland Britain had switched to other burial customs. There’s no fee at all, whatever time you turn up, a short walk from Higher Moors and Porth Hellick Pool, with Giant’s Castle less than a kilometre further along the coast.
