Cairn, Baunteen, Co. Limerick

Co. Limerick |

Cairns

Cairn, Baunteen, Co. Limerick

A prehistoric cairn that has effectively vanished is a strange thing to go looking for, yet the site at Baunteen in County Limerick carries its own peculiar weight precisely because of what is no longer there.

When the Archaeological Survey of Ireland visited in 1999, surveyors found no surface remains of either the cairn or its cist, the stone-lined burial box that once sat at its centre. The site does not appear on Ordnance Survey Ireland maps. What remains is essentially a field on a slight north-west-facing slope, with open views in all directions, and the knowledge that something significant was once built here and then quietly taken apart.

The antiquarian Thomas Johnson Westropp recorded the site in two separate publications, in 1919 and 1920, and his descriptions give a sense of how substantial it once was. The cairn measured between roughly six and seven and a half metres across, built chiefly from small sandstone field stones, with the cist and kerb blocks fashioned from purple conglomerate, a visually striking rock composed of rounded fragments cemented together. Three of the kerb stones, which would originally have ringed the mound, still marked out a rough semicircle when Westropp visited. The cist's western end stone was nearly two metres long and stood almost a metre high. By his 1920 account, however, the eastern ring wall, the cist covers, and most of the smaller stones had already been removed to build field fences, a fate that befell countless monuments across rural Ireland. Westropp also noted the cairn's proximity to a pair of conjoined enclosures roughly forty metres to the north, and linked the whole landscape to an older mythology: the Galtee Mountains were known in Irish tradition as Crotta Cliach, the harps of Cliach, after a divine harper named Cliu said to have given the mountains their name. The parallel watercourses and coombs running down the mountain's flanks were read as the strings of two harps.

The site sits in pasture land in Baunteen townland, on the northern fringes of the Galtees. Because it is unregistered on standard maps and carries no visible surface trace, locating it requires checking the National Monuments Service record directly beforehand. The conjoined enclosures to the north, recorded under the references LI050-018001- and LI050-018002-, offer a more tangible landmark when approaching the area. Access across private farmland would require landowner permission. The landscape itself, with the Galtees rising behind and the low country opening to the north-west, gives some sense of why a monument was placed here, even if the monument itself is long gone.

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