Mound, Annaghkeen, Co. Galway

Co. Galway |

Ritual/Ceremonial

Mound, Annaghkeen, Co. Galway

On the eastern shore of Lough Corrib, at the western end of a low gravel ridge, sits a mound that has been quietly losing its identity for centuries.

Locally it goes by the Irish name An Carn Bheag, meaning roughly "the small cairn", and that name is more informative than the site itself now appears. What survives is an almost circular mound roughly 21.5 metres across, densely overgrown and poorly preserved, with a central depression that points to gradual robbing out of its stone material over the years. People have been pulling it apart, stone by stone, long enough that much of whatever it once was has dispersed into field walls or farmyards nearby.

In 1925, a writer named Costello described it as "an untouched Cairn of stones", which is a curious designation given the evidence of disturbance visible today, and suggests the deterioration has continued in the intervening century. A cairn, in the Irish archaeological context, is typically a mound of heaped stones, often prehistoric in origin and sometimes covering a burial. The central hollow at Annaghkeen is a familiar sign of either deliberate removal of a burial chamber's capstones or sustained stone-robbing over generations. Two comparable monuments lie within roughly 750 metres to the north and northeast, which raises the possibility that this was once part of a loose cluster of such features in the landscape around this stretch of the Corrib shoreline, though their relationship to one another has never been formally investigated.

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Pete F
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