Tregiffian Burial Chamber

A Neolithic or early Bronze Age chambered tomb with an entrance passage, walled and roofed with stone slabs, leading into the central chamber.

Tregiffian is a type of chambered tomb known as an entrance grave, and survives largely intact, despite the levelling of part of its mound to make a road in the 1840s.

Entrance graves are funerary and ritual monuments dating to the later Neolithic, Early and Middle Bronze Age (around 3000–1000 BC).

Of 93 recorded examples in England, 79 are on the Isles of Scilly, and the remainder are confined to the Penwith peninsula at the western tip of Cornwall; they are also found on the Channel Islands and in Brittany.

Such tombs typically comprise a roughly circular mound of heaped rubble and earth built over a rectangular chamber, which is constructed from slabs set edge to edge, or rubble walling, and roofed with further slabs.

The few entrance graves that have been systematically excavated have revealed cremated human bone and funerary urns, usually within the chambers but occasionally within the mound.

However, it is by no means certain that they were solely – or even primarily – burial places. Some may have been shrines at which various religious rituals and ceremonies were performed.