Cairn - boundary cairn, Cabragh, Co. Sligo
Co. Sligo |
Cairns
On the upper bog-covered slopes of the Ox Mountains in County Sligo, there is a cairn that no longer exists.
It is classified officially as a "Cairn Possible", which is a category that manages to be both bureaucratically cautious and quietly poetic. No physical remains are visible on the ground, and the structure, if it ever took a recognisable form, was probably built after 1700 AD. What makes it worth noting is not what it was, but what it was part of.
This vanished heap of stones was the third most northerly of ten cairns arranged in a long linear sequence along the townland boundary between Cabragh and Gortakeeran. Boundary cairns of this kind were a practical technology of land division, piles of stone placed at intervals to mark where one community's territory ended and another's began, readable in the landscape without any written document to back them up. What is curious here is that none of the ten cairns appear on the 1837 edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map, which was produced with considerable attention to surface features across Ireland. Their absence from that survey suggests either that they were already gone or reduced to near-nothing by the mid-nineteenth century, or that the surveyors simply did not recognise them as features worth recording. Either way, the boundary line they once defined has outlasted the markers that defined it.