Cairn, Muckduff, Co. Wicklow

Co. Wicklow |

Cairns

Cairn, Muckduff, Co. Wicklow

Just below the summit of Carrig Mountain in County Wicklow, a modest mound of stones sits quietly in the landscape, cut through by a drainage gully and half-swallowed by peat.

It measures roughly ten metres across, which is small even by the standards of prehistoric cairns, and its disturbed condition makes it easy to overlook entirely. What lifts it out of the ordinary is the possibility, raised by archaeologist Michael Herity in 1974, that it may originally have been a passage tomb, a type of Neolithic monument in which a stone-lined corridor leads to a burial chamber at the centre of the mound. Passage tombs are more commonly associated with dramatic hilltop locations and elaborate kerbing, which makes this unassuming scatter of stones on a Wicklow hillside quietly intriguing.

Herity's suggestion, published in 1974, has not been confirmed by excavation, and the cairn's disturbed state means much of whatever evidence it once held may be gone. The drainage gully that cuts across it is probably the work of post-medieval or modern land management, a common cause of damage to upland monuments across Ireland. The peat that covers part of the structure has, paradoxically, both obscured and protected what remains. The cairn lies approximately sixty metres north-west of the summit of Carrig Mountain, a position that, if the passage tomb identification is correct, would fit the broader Neolithic pattern of siting burial monuments near high ground with wide territorial views.

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