Today, if you look carefully, you will find a scattering of stones. The cairn itself is gone.

The scholar and Irish-language topographer John O'Donovan documented Clorane around 1840, recording it as a structure roughly one hundred paces in circumference and six feet in perpendicular height, measurements that translate to approximately thirty metres across and nearly two metres tall. That is a considerable presence on a ridgeline. O'Donovan was meticulous about such things, and his fieldwork for the Ordnance Survey in the 1830s produced some of the most detailed early records of ancient sites across Ireland. His description of Clorane gives us a fixed point in time, a cairn substantial enough to be measured and named, sitting on the east-northeast to west-southwest spine of Forth Mountain. What happened between his account and the present is not documented in any detail, though the gradual disappearance of cairn material, stones repurposed for walls, field clearance, or simple erosion over generations, is a familiar story at sites like this across the country.