Tregiffian Burial Chamber

Useful Information

Location:	St Buryan, Penzance, Cornwall, TR19 6BQ. 3 km southeast of St Buryan, on B3315, 9 km from Penzance. Use the parking area for the Merry Maidens Stone Circle, 130 m walk along the road. (50.0643473, -5.5919467)
Open:	All year daily during daylight. [2024]
Fee:	free. [2024]
Classification:	Cave Tomb
Light:	bring torch.
Dimension:
Guided tours:
Photography:
Accessibility:
Bibliography:
Address:	Tregiffian Burial Chamber, Cornwall Heritage Trust.
As far as we know this information was accurate when it was published (see years in brackets), but may have changed since then. Please check rates and details directly with the companies in question if you need more recent info.

History

Description

The Tregiffian Burial Chamber is a Neolithic or early Bronze Age chambered tomb. An entrance passage, walled and roofed with stone slabs, leads into the central chamber. Such funerary and ritual monuments were erected from the later Neolithic and during early and middle Bronze Age, in other words between 3000 and 1000 BC. Most of those graves in England are located on the Isles of Scilly, the rest is confined to the Penwith peninsula. In other words, it is rather unique for England. The grave was originally covered by a roughly circular mound of heaped rubble and earth, but here it was partly leveled to make a road in the 1840s. But the chambered tomb survived largely intact.

This site has a single drawback: the chamber is 4.9 m long and 1.9 m wide, but only 90 cm high, in other words, entering requires crawling. Obviously most visitors do not enter the grave.