On a plateau of the Comeragh Mountains in County Waterford, there is a cairn that quietly refuses to be read. A cairn, in the most basic sense, is a mound of stones built up over time, often as a funerary or territorial marker in the prehistoric landscape. This one is subrectangular in shape, measuring roughly 8.3 metres east to west and 6.3 metres north to south, and rises to a modest height of between 0.2 and 0.9 metres. That much seems ancient enough. But at its centre sits a neat pyramid of stones reaching 0.9 metres high, and this, archaeologists suspect, is almost certainly a modern addition, placed there by a person or persons unknown, at some point after the original monument was left alone.

The cairn sits on high ground overlooking Coum Iarthar Lough to the west. A coum, sometimes spelled corrie or cwm, is a deep, bowl-shaped hollow carved into a mountainside by glacial action, and the Comeraghs hold several of them, their loughs cold and dark even on bright days. The plateau setting would have made this an exposed and deliberate location for whoever first raised the cairn, a place visible from a distance and facing out over a landscape shaped by ice. The later pyramid at its heart introduces a different kind of question: whether it was built as a waymarker, a folly, or simply because someone found a pile of stones and wanted to add to it.