Cairn, Burren, Co. Cavan

The cairn is modest enough by prehistoric standards, roughly 5.5 metres across and no more than a metre high, yet its proximity to the tomb suggests the two monuments were part of the same funerary or ritual landscape, rather than accidental neighbours across a field.

A cairn of this type is essentially a mound of heaped stones, often raised over a burial or used to mark a significant place in the prehistoric landscape. What gives this one some structural interest is the survival of its kerbstones along the southern half of its circumference. Kerbstones are upright slabs set around the base of a cairn to retain the loose material and define its edge, and several here still lean inward at their original angle. Most measure around 0.5 by 0.8 metres, though two on the south-east side and one to the west are noticeably taller, reaching 1.2 metres. The monument has not come through the centuries entirely unscathed; tree-planting has disturbed it, and the northern half of the kerb is gone. The site is recorded in a run of references stretching from Lowry-Corry and Richardson in 1937 through to de Valera and Ó Nualláin in 1972 and a later study by Sherlock in 2007, suggesting it has drawn quiet scholarly attention across several generations without ever becoming widely known.