Cairn - burial cairn, Teeskagh, Co. Clare

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Cairn – burial cairn, Teeskagh, Co. Clare

Beneath a tangle of hazel, blackthorn, and briar on the southern edge of a shallow valley in the Burren, a large prehistoric cairn sits largely unvisited and thoroughly obscured.

It measures roughly 14 metres north to south and 12 metres east to west, rising to between one and one and a half metres in height, a substantial mound by any measure, yet its overgrown state means it could easily be walked past without a second glance. What sets it apart, beyond its size, is a detail recorded by the antiquarian T. J. Westropp in 1905: the cairn is built of large blocks, but incorporated within it is a great boulder that, in Westropp's own words, was 'evidently deposited there by older and mightier agencies than the cairn builders.' He meant glacial action, the boulder having been left behind by retreating ice long before any human hand stacked a stone. Whoever built the cairn chose to work around it, or perhaps deliberately to include it.

The site sits within an extensive field system that spans multiple periods of use, suggesting this part of the Burren has been worked and inhabited across a long stretch of prehistory. At or near the centre of the cairn, slightly to the south-east, there is a cist, a small stone-lined box grave of the kind typically associated with Bronze Age burials, where a body or cremated remains would have been placed before the mound was raised over it. Ordnance Survey maps from 1897 and again in the 1920 Cassini edition marked the spot with the plain label 'Ancient Grave', a curiously modest designation for something so physically imposing. The location is also roughly 65 metres south-west of a low cliff from which a waterfall descends, fed by what the same maps called the Seven Streams of Teeskagh, or 'Seacht Srotha na Taosca' in Irish, as recorded on Tim Robinson's celebrated map of the Burren published in 1977. It is the kind of detail that suggests the cairn builders were not indifferent to their surroundings; water, a glacial erratic, and an elevated view across a valley all converge in the same small area.

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