At Cloonyquin in County Roscommon, there was once a cairn, a mound of gathered stones, sitting roughly eight metres to the east of a rath, the type of circular earthwork enclosure commonly associated with early medieval settlement in Ireland. The cairn is gone now, leaving behind only a brief written description and a quiet question about what it actually was.

When Gannon recorded it in 1972, the cairn had a hollow at its centre, which she considered probably natural in origin. The proximity to the rath is noted but not explained, and when Herity came to write on the subject in 1987, the cairn did not feature at all. The leading interpretation is that it was a clearance cairn, the kind of modest, unglamorous accumulation that results from generations of farmers pulling stones out of fields and piling them somewhere out of the way. Clearance cairns are scattered across the Irish landscape in considerable numbers, rarely documented and rarely mourned, which may explain why this one slipped out of the record before anyone could say with certainty what it was. By the time interest caught up with it, the cairn itself had gone.