Cairn - boundary cairn, Cortober, Co. Leitrim

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Cairns

Cairn – boundary cairn, Cortober, Co. Leitrim

On a broad east-west ridge straddling the border between County Leitrim and County Cavan, there sits a modest pile of stones that most walkers would pass without a second glance.

Its significance lies not in age or legend but in bureaucratic precision: this cairn was placed here by the Ordnance Survey to mark the county boundary, and it is one of the very few survivors of its kind in the area.

The cairn appears in the 1907 edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map, described in careful italic lettering as a "Pile of Stones", the standard notation used to indicate a deliberate boundary marker rather than any ancient monument. The Ordnance Survey of Ireland, which carried out its great mapping project across the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, erected a small number of such cairns in this area to make the county line legible on the ground. Only about two were placed in this vicinity, and fewer still remain. What looks unremarkable is, in fact, a rare physical remnant of the survey process itself, the kind of object that was always functional rather than commemorative, and which has survived more by accident than by anyone's intention to preserve it.

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