Cairn, Ballycarroll, Co. Clare
Co. Clare |
Cairns
In a field of rough grazing in Ballycarroll, County Clare, a low mound of stones sits quietly within the remains of an early Irish cashel.
The cairn measures roughly six metres east to west and four metres north to south, rising to only about forty centimetres at its highest point, which is modest even by the understated standards of prehistoric or early medieval funerary monuments. Easy to walk past, easy to dismiss as a field clearance heap, it is the kind of feature that rewards a second look.
The cairn sits to the south-east of the centre of the cashel it shares its ground with. A cashel is a stone-walled enclosure, typically circular, associated with early medieval settlement and farming in Ireland, though the enclosures sometimes incorporate or adjoin features of considerably older date. The relationship between the cairn and the surrounding cashel walls is not elaborated in what survives about the site, but the pairing is not unusual in the Irish landscape, where different periods of human activity frequently overlap and older monuments are incorporated, deliberately or incidentally, into later ones.