Cairn, Ballynagallagh, Co. Limerick

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Cairns

Cairn, Ballynagallagh, Co. Limerick

A folk tale recorded at Lough Gur holds that a giant and his golden sword lie buried in the hill of Baile na gCaillech, which translates roughly as the townland of the old women or nuns.

The mound associated with that story, known locally as the Hero's Grave, was still visible in living memory, marked on the 1927 edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map and sitting on the eastern side of an ancient roadway called Cladh na Leac. Today, nothing of it can be seen above ground. The grave has not been excavated, moved, or formally demolished; it has simply disappeared into the landscape, leaving only its name and a map annotation behind.

When Lynch described the site in 1913, there was both a pillar stone and a burial mound standing roughly 300 yards south-west of a nearby megalithic tomb called Leaba na Muice, a name meaning the pig's bed, which is a traditional Irish term for a certain type of ancient stone tomb. By 1944, when O'Kelly recorded the mound in detail, part of it had already been dug away, leaving a hollow centre measuring 7.3 metres east to west and 6 metres north to south, with a maximum height of just 1.2 metres. Two large stones at its southern base may have been remnants of a kerb, the ring of stones that typically defines the edge of a cairn or burial mound. A faint outer bank on the north-west side was also noted, though O'Kelly acknowledged it might simply be spoil from earlier digging. The standing stone that once accompanied the mound on the eastern side of Cladh na Leac is similarly gone, recorded on the 1927 map only as a site.

The area around Ballynagallagh is unusually dense with prehistoric and early medieval remains. Within a few hundred metres of where the Hero's Grave once stood, there is a megalithic structure known locally as the Giant's Grave to the south, the Leaba na Muice tomb to the north-north-east, and the church and graveyard of Mainister na Galliagh, the Monastery of the Nuns, to the east. Visiting the general area around Lough Gur gives a sense of how layered this landscape is, though anyone looking specifically for the Hero's Grave will find only the field where it once sat, the old roadway of Cladh na Leac nearby, and the folk memory of a giant waiting underground with his sword.

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