Cairn, Cahermackirilla, Co. Clare
Co. Clare |
Cairns
Two townland walls meet this cairn and then quietly step around it, as though by agreement.
That small act of avoidance, repeated in drystone across centuries, is one of the more telling things about this low mound on a wooded high point in County Clare. The cairn, a subcircular heap of large, unmortared stones sitting on a shelf of land between the Poulacarran and Eanty valleys, was significant enough for later farmers to work around rather than through.
The mound measures roughly 11.4 metres from northeast to southwest and stands only between 0.2 and 0.5 metres above the surrounding ground, so it reads less as a monument than as a slight thickening of the earth beneath the hazel canopy. A cairn of this kind is typically a prehistoric burial or ritual structure, a stone-built counterpart to an earthen barrow, though no kerbstones, the upright edge-stones that often define a cairn's boundary, are visible here. The top is notably flat and the edges reasonably crisp on three sides; the northwest face is scarped, dropping away where the land itself falls steeply. A narrow berm, a flat shelf between one and two and a half metres wide, rings the cairn before the walls begin. Those walls are worth noting: the higher one, standing 1.2 metres, marks the boundary between Poulacarran and Cahermackirilla townlands and curves around the monument from south to northwest. A second, lower wall avoids it from the northeast around to the south. The structure was recorded on Ordnance Survey six-inch maps in both 1842 and 1920, described there by the familiar hachure marks used to indicate earthworks and mounds, and was later catalogued, perhaps too cautiously, as a mere enclosure.