This one, however, carries a detail that shifts it into stranger territory. Writing between 1900 and 1902, the antiquarian T. J. Westropp noted that south of the nearby church there was a small cairn around which coffins were carried, a ritual circuit of the dead before burial that was once practised at certain sites in Ireland. Whether this mound and Westropp's cairn are one and the same is not certain, but the possibility has been raised.

The cairn is modest in scale, roughly 8 metres north to south and 6 metres east to west, and rises to between one and two metres in height. Some of the stones at its north-west corner show signs of having been laid in courses, reaching about 1.2 metres, which hints that whatever lies beneath the later accumulation may have an older origin. Westropp, who was exceptionally thorough in recording the prehistoric and early Christian remains of County Clare, also noted in separate work from 1906 to 1907 that a cist, a type of box-shaped stone burial chamber, was once associated with a cairn in the Carran townland area. No cist is visible in this particular mound today, though the fieldstone rubble could conceal much. The cairn was already being marked on the Ordnance Survey six-inch maps of 1842 and again in 1920, labelled simply as 'Carn', suggesting it was a recognised feature of the landscape long before modern field clearance may have added to its bulk. By the time Adele Swinfen was writing about the ancient church sites of the Burren in 1992, the practice of carrying coffins around the cairn had passed out of living memory entirely.