Porth Hellick Down
Porth Hellick Down is a remarkable prehistoric burial site located on the island of St Mary's, the largest of the Isles of Scilly, off the southwestern tip of Cornwall. It is one of the finest and best-preserved entrance grave complexes in the British Isles, consisting of a cluster of Neolithic and Bronze Age chambered tombs that have stood on this windswept headland for somewhere between three and five thousand years. The site is managed by English Heritage and is freely accessible to the public, making it one of the more rewarding archaeological experiences available anywhere in the Scilly archipelago. What makes Porth Hellick Down particularly special is not just the age or condition of its monuments, but the density of them — several tombs occupy a relatively compact area on the down, giving a vivid sense of this landscape as a place of sustained ceremonial and mortuary significance across many generations.
The tombs at Porth Hellick Down belong to a type known as entrance graves, a tradition peculiar to the Isles of Scilly and the far west of Cornwall. These are megalithic structures characterised by a single circular or oval mound of earth and stone, with a simple rectangular chamber approached through a low entrance passage. They differ from the more elaborate passage graves and long barrows found elsewhere in Britain, and represent a local architectural tradition that flourished during the late Neolithic and into the early Bronze Age, roughly between 2500 and 1500 BCE. The people who built them were farmers and perhaps fishermen, inhabiting what is now a scattered archipelago but was then likely a single much larger landmass, before rising sea levels after the last glaciation progressively inundated the lower ground. The Down itself was evidently a preferred location for the dead, and several distinct tomb mounds can be found clustered here, suggesting it held enduring sacred status across centuries if not millennia.
The largest and most prominent of the tombs at Porth Hellick Down is in an exceptional state of preservation. Its capstones are still in place, its kerb stones intact, and the chamber within can be peered into through the low entrance, giving a visceral sense of the enclosed, intimate space that was once used for the placement of human remains. Entrance graves appear to have been used for collective burial, possibly of family groups or community members, with bones sometimes arranged or rearranged over time. Excavations at similar sites across Scilly have yielded cremated and unburnt bone, pottery, and occasional grave goods, though Porth Hellick Down itself has not been extensively excavated in modern times and much of what lies beneath its mounds remains undisturbed.
The physical experience of visiting Porth Hellick Down is quietly arresting. The down is an area of open heathland rising gently above the eastern shore of St Mary's, covered in heather, bracken, and coarse grass. The air carries the salt tang of the Atlantic, and on most days the sound of wind moving through the vegetation and the distant call of seabirds provides an almost constant low accompaniment. The stones of the tombs are grey and weathered, patched with orange and silver lichen, and their weight and permanence feel palpable against the open sky. On clear days, views extend across the eastern waters of the archipelago toward St Martin's, Tresco, and the Eastern Isles, a prospect that has changed dramatically in shape since the Bronze Age but remains extraordinarily beautiful.
Porth Hellick Down lies on the eastern side of St Mary's, close to the small sandy bay of Porth Hellick itself, a sheltered inlet that has long been used by local boats. The area around the Down includes wetland, scrub, and small fields that form part of a diverse ecological zone. The bay and its approaches are of additional historical interest because it was here, in October 1707, that the body of Sir Cloudesley Shovell, the British Admiral killed in one of the worst maritime disasters in Royal Navy history, was washed ashore. Shovell's fleet of twenty-one ships had struck the Western Rocks to the southwest of Scilly in fog and poor navigation, with the loss of around fourteen hundred lives and four vessels. His body, initially buried near Porth Hellick, was later exhumed and re-interred at Westminster Abbey, but the spot is marked nearby with a modest memorial stone, adding a layer of dramatic post-medieval history to an already storied landscape.
Getting to Porth Hellick Down requires first reaching St Mary's, which is served by the Isles of Scilly Steamship Company's passenger ferry from Penzance as well as by flights from Lands End, Newquay, and Exeter airports via Isles of Scilly Travel. Once on St Mary's, the Down is accessible on foot from Hugh Town, the island's only town, in roughly thirty to forty-five minutes by following the coastal path eastward. The terrain is gentle and the paths are well-maintained, though stout footwear is advisable given the often-wet ground on the Down itself. There is no vehicle access directly to the site, and no facilities such as toilets or refreshments nearby, so visitors should come prepared. The site is openly accessible at all times of year and there is no admission charge.
The best time to visit is arguably late spring or early summer, when the heather and wildflowers are at their most colourful, the days are long, and the island is not yet overwhelmed with summer visitors. That said, the site has a particular melancholy beauty in autumn and winter, when the light is lower, the crowds have gone, and the antiquity of the place asserts itself more insistently. Early morning visits, before the day-trippers arrive from the ferry, offer the most atmospheric experience. The Isles of Scilly as a whole have a micro-climate somewhat milder than the mainland, with frost rare and snow almost unheard of, so the site is accessible year-round in reasonable comfort.
One of the more haunting aspects of Porth Hellick Down is the sense it conveys of a living tradition of landscape use stretching from the Neolithic through the present day. The tombs were built by people who chose this elevated eastern flank of the island deliberately, overlooking water on multiple sides, perhaps to position the dead as guardians or witnesses of the sea-lanes between islands, or perhaps because the Down was simply already sacred by convention. The juxtaposition of these ancient monuments with the Admiral Shovell memorial nearby — representing a wholly different kind of mass death at sea — creates an unexpectedly resonant dialogue across four millennia of human experience on this same stretch of coastline. For anyone with an interest in prehistory, maritime history, or simply the experience of standing somewhere that has mattered to human beings for a very long time, Porth Hellick Down rewards a visit out of all proportion to its modest scale.