A cairn is, at its simplest, a mound of stones raised by human hands, and the Burren is full of them, most dating to the Neolithic or Bronze Age. What makes any individual example worth pausing over is precisely the question it refuses to answer: who built it, when, and for whom.

Ballyallaban sits in a part of County Clare where prehistoric activity was considerable. The Burren's exposed limestone was, counterintuitively, a more hospitable landscape in the early prehistoric period than the dense, waterlogged forests that covered much of lowland Ireland. Communities farmed here, buried their dead in megalithic tombs, and left behind field systems that are still faintly legible beneath the rock. A cairn in this context might mark a burial, a territorial boundary, or a site of ceremonial significance; in many cases, it is all three at once, the functions of the living and the dead layered over centuries of use and reuse.