Cairn - burial cairn, Slievenaglasha, Co. Clare
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Cairns
On the summit ridge of Glasgeivnagh Hill in County Clare, nine prehistoric burial cairns sit in a loose cluster, and the area was already acknowledged on Ordnance Survey maps from 1897 onwards under the blunt place-name 'Carns'.
That cartographic candour says something: this was never a place people forgot about, even if it rarely appears in broader accounts of Clare's prehistory. The hill is semi-karst terrain, meaning the limestone beneath the thin soil breaks through in characteristic fashion, and to the east the ground drops sharply to a cliff some 65 metres below. The cairns occupy rough pasture within what surveyors describe as a large multiperiod field system, layers of land use accumulated across centuries.
This particular cairn is subcircular in plan, measuring roughly 7 metres east to west and 5.8 metres north to south, and still rises to between 0.7 and 1.4 metres in height despite considerable disturbance. A cairn of this type is essentially a mound of stones, often covering a burial chamber, raised during the prehistoric period. Kerbstones, the upright or set stones that define the outer edge of such a mound, remain visible continuously around the south-eastern to south-western arc, and intermittently elsewhere. The centre of the mound has been hollowed out, a reliable sign of robbing, when later people removed the stone for building material or simply broke in looking for whatever lay inside. When the antiquarian T. J. Westropp visited and recorded the site in 1913, he noted kerbstones averaging around 1.22 metres in length and between 0.61 and 0.91 metres high running all the way around, along with a central cist, a small stone-lined burial box, that had already been opened and partly backfilled by that point. What Westropp saw and what surveyors measure today tell a quiet story of incremental loss, stone by stone, over the intervening century and more.