Cairn, Acaill Bheag, Co. Mayo

Cairns of this kind are among the oldest man-made structures on the island, some dating back four or five thousand years to the Neolithic or Bronze Age, raised by communities who used prominent hilltops and island outcrops as places to inter their dead or mark territory visible across water and land alike. That one survives here, on so small and relatively obscure an island, gives it a quiet weight.

Acaill Bheag sits in the shadow of its much larger neighbour Achill Island, the biggest island off the Irish coast, and the broader area has a long record of human settlement stretching back millennia. Small islands like this one were not always as marginal as they might appear today; in prehistory and the early medieval period they were sometimes preferred precisely because they were bounded and defensible, or because the sea was a route rather than a barrier. The cairn on Acaill Bheag belongs to that long, largely unwritten chapter of Mayo's past, when the western seaboard was densely, if quietly, inhabited.