A prehistoric burial chamber beside the road near the Merry Maidens, its passage roofed with slabs and one entrance stone carved with cup marks
Open accessfree to visit at any reasonable time
Standing remainssubstantial fabric survives to stand in front of
Tregiffian sits beside the B3315, a short walk from the Merry Maidens stone circle. It was built in the Neolithic period or early Bronze Age as an entrance grave, a mound raised over a stone-lined passage leading to a burial chamber. Nearly all entrance graves lie on the Isles of Scilly; only a few survive on the Cornish mainland, and all of those are on this stretch of the Penwith peninsula.
Roughly two-thirds of the chamber survives today, a low, narrow space built from edge-set slabs and roofed with four capstones. Part of the mound was cut away to build the road in 1846, taking the rest of the chamber with it. The entrance is a gap under a metre wide between two slabs, one of them carved with around 25 small hollows called cup marks, possibly the earliest known example of this kind of carving in the south-west. What you see today is a cast; the original was moved to the Royal Cornwall Museum in Truro for safekeeping. Digs in the 19th and 20th centuries turned up cremated bone and burial urns inside, though tombs of this kind may have doubled as shrines rather than simple graves.
English Heritage looks after Tregiffian, free to see at any reasonable time. It stands right on the verge of the B3315, so mind passing traffic if you stop for a closer look.
