Qualla: Bant's Carn

Bant's Carn: Introduction

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Mike Knell, CC BY-SA 2.0. The chamber inside Bant's Carn is just under five metres long, a metre and a half wide, and only as tall as a child can stand in. Four enormous capstones make the roof. The entrance passage runs four and a half metres into the hillside before a deliberately set jamb-stone separates the outer world from the inner. When the archaeologist George Bonsor first crawled inside in 1900, he found the tomb mostly empty: cremated human remains at the back of the chamber, and the broken sherds of Neolithic and Bronze Age pottery on the floor. Whatever had been here had been here a long time. The dead were not many. The work to bury them had been considerable.

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Image: Mike Knell | CC BY-SA 2.0

Bant's Carn: Scillonian Entrance Graves

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit don cload, CC BY-SA 2.0. Bant's Carn is one of the best surviving examples of a Scillonian entrance grave, a Bronze Age tomb type that is almost unique to these islands. They differ from the larger chambered cairns of the mainland in being smaller, more numerous, and built directly into hillsides rather ...

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Image: don cload | CC BY-SA 2.0

Bant's Carn: The Village Below

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Mike Knell, CC BY-SA 2.0. Walk a few hundred metres downhill from Bant's Carn and you reach Halangy Down, the remains of an Iron Age and Romano-British village. The juxtaposition is striking. The Bronze Age tomb is at the top of the slope; the later village sits below it, occupied perhaps from around 200 ...

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Image: Mike Knell | CC BY-SA 2.0

Bant's Carn: An Excavation and a Lost Notebook

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Mike Knell, CC BY-SA 2.0. George Bonsor was a curious figure: born in France, raised in Belgium, an artist and archaeologist who came to Spain as a young man and ran his own excavations across Andalusia and somehow ended up digging on St Mary's in 1900. He found Bant's Carn surprisingly empty, the cremate...

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Image: Mike Knell | CC BY-SA 2.0

Bant's Carn: The 1970 Restoration

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Paul Allison, CC BY-SA 2.0. In 1970, archaeologist P. Ashbee led a restoration of Bant's Carn. The eastern capstone had slipped; the southern portal stone needed re-setting. During this work, 140 decorated prehistoric pottery fragments were uncovered around the portal stone, along with two worked flints. Th...

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Image: Paul Allison | CC BY-SA 2.0