A cairn, at its simplest, is a mound of loosely piled stones raised over a burial, often dating to the Neolithic or Bronze Age periods, and the practice of constructing them was widespread enough that examples survive in almost every county. What distinguishes any individual cairn, though, is the particular accumulation of time and silence around it, the way it becomes part of the ground it occupies.

Coskeam is a small townland in Clare, a county whose limestone-heavy terrain has preserved a remarkable density of prehistoric monuments. Clare's geology, the flat expanses of the Burren to the north and the more varied ground elsewhere in the county, has long made it a place where the dead were marked with care, and cairns of this kind are among the oldest forms of that marking. Beyond its location and classification, the specific history of this particular cairn, its dimensions, the period it belongs to, whether it has been excavated or disturbed, remains undocumented in any publicly available form at present.