Cairn - clearance cairn, Kilbeg, Co. Wicklow

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Cairns

Cairn – clearance cairn, Kilbeg, Co. Wicklow

On the lower south-western slope of Sorrell Hill in County Wicklow, above a valley shadowed by Black Hill to the south, a scatter of low stone mounds sits in open mountain grazing land well beyond any modern field enclosure.

These are clearance cairns, the piled debris of stones lifted from the ground to make it workable, and they are not here alone. Around them, strung along the lip of a scarp where the ground drops away into boggy hollows, sit the remains of six hut sites and a network of stone boundary walls, all contained within a surprisingly compact and legible area, bounded at the south-east by a small stream and at the north-west by a field boundary wall likely dating to the nineteenth century.

The whole complex is thought to represent booleying, the seasonal practice of transhumance in which people, usually younger members of a farming community, drove cattle up to summer mountain pastures and lived there temporarily in simple shelters while the lowland fields recovered. The hut sites and stone walls appear to be broadly contemporary with one another, and the assemblage as a whole may date to the Early Christian period, roughly the fifth to twelfth centuries. The clearance cairns number around seven in the upper part of the site, most modest in scale, averaging about two and a half metres across and only thirty centimetres high. Two are considerably larger; one of these measures eight metres long, six metres wide, and stands sixty centimetres tall, and sits close to one of the hut sites along the scarp edge. At the south-eastern end of the group, an L-shaped stone wall is thought to be the remnant of a more recent sheep pen, a reminder that the hillside continued to be used for grazing long after whatever community built those original shelters had gone.

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