Cairn - burial cairn, Forenaghts Great, Co. Kildare

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Cairn – burial cairn, Forenaghts Great, Co. Kildare

On the landscaped grounds of Furness House in County Kildare, a low grass-covered mound sits on a narrow pasture ridge, looking to most eyes like nothing more than a gentle swell in the field. It is only about sixty centimetres at its highest point and roughly seventeen metres across, the kind of feature that centuries of farming and landscaping could easily have erased entirely. That it survives at all, with its kerb of large stones still outlining the perimeter, makes it quietly remarkable.

Excavations carried out in the early 1980s uncovered what lay beneath the turf: a mound composed of earth, stone, and gravel, built around a central oval-shaped stone core set over a small stake hole. Radiocarbon dating of charcoal from that stake hole placed the monument in prehistory. Beneath the surface, archaeologists found several pits and two deposits of cremated bone, one identified as the remains of an adult. A burial cairn of this type served as a place of interment rather than a simple marker, the mound itself forming a monument over the dead. Among the finds recovered were a fragment of a blue glass bracelet and a bronze ring, small objects that suggest the burial rites here involved more than bare necessity. Around sixty-five metres to the north, a separate earthen enclosure contains a standing stone and a cist burial, a cist being a small stone-lined grave, indicating that this ridge in Forenaghts Great once held considerable significance as a place associated with the dead across what may have been a long period of use.

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