Cairn, Ballynahunt, Co. Kerry
Co. Kerry |
Cairns
On a ridge high above the Dingle Peninsula, a prehistoric cairn sits beneath a modern surveying post, its ancient stones quietly cannibalised for sheep folds and an Ordnance Survey trigonometrical station.
The cairn goes by the name Cuchullin's House, or Tigh ChĂșchulainn in Irish, linking it to the great Ulster hero of early Irish mythology, a naming convention applied across Ireland to monuments whose true origins had long since faded from local memory.
The cairn is the easternmost of two that crown the same east-west ridge, its companion sitting roughly 1.5 kilometres away along the same summit line. That ridge forms a natural boundary, dividing Lough Anascaul and the Anascaul valley to the south from the glen of Glanteenassig to the north. The monument itself measures approximately 12 metres in diameter and stands around 2 metres high. A drystone retaining wall, the kind of kerbing used to hold a cairn's loose rubble in shape, survives to a height of about 1.25 metres around the western half of the perimeter. The eastern side tells a different story. Stones robbed from the cairn have been incorporated into a series of sheep shelters and folds built around its base, a common fate for upland monuments that sat conveniently close to ready-cut building material. The trigonometrical station planted on the summit by the Ordnance Survey is thought to have drawn on the same source.
The site sits on exposed high ground on the southern side of the Dingle Peninsula in County Kerry, and the ridge setting means that even on a clear day the approach involves serious upland terrain. The drystone retaining wall along the western arc is the most intact surviving structural feature worth seeking out, offering a clearer sense of the cairn's original form than the disturbed eastern half.