Skeater Rock, Bargy Commons, Co. Wexford
Co. Wexford |
Cairns
On the south-western summit of Forth Mountain in County Wexford, there is a site where something significant once stood and then was made to disappear entirely.
A cairn, a mounded burial structure built from accumulated stone, roughly thirty metres across, occupied the crest of the south-facing slope close to Skeater Rock. It is no longer there. It was removed in 1884, its stones cleared away, and its precise original location has since been lost.
What prompted the removal was the discovery of a bowl food vessel, a type of ceramic pot associated with Bronze Age funerary practice, typically placed alongside the remains of the dead as an offering or container for food. The find was recorded by Ffrench in 1895, suggesting there was at least some attempt to document what had been uncovered, even as the cairn itself was being dismantled. Culleton, writing in 1984, noted plainly that the structure was completely removed and that its exact position could no longer be determined. More recently, in 2022, archaeological testing carried out by C. Moriarty approximately forty-five metres to the west of the assumed location produced no trace of the cairn at all, confirming that whatever physical evidence once existed above or below the surface had been thoroughly erased.
What remains is essentially an absence: a named place, a recorded object now elsewhere, and a blank on the hillside where a monument of considerable size once marked the landscape. The bowl food vessel survives in the record; the cairn that held it does not.