Cairn, Crockaunadreenagh, Co. Dublin
Co. Dublin |
Cairns
Somewhere beneath the fairway of the third hole at Slade Valley Golf Club, a prehistoric cairn sits undisturbed, invisible to anyone teeing off above it.
There are no stones breaking the grass, no signage, no obvious break in the landscape to suggest that anything of archaeological significance lies underfoot. The site is simply there, absorbed into the course, playing on in silence.
The cairn sits on Knockandinny, at the northern extremity of Saggart Hill in County Dublin, in the townland of Crockaunadreenagh. It was recorded by Kilbride-Jones in 1950 as a circular cairn, a type of prehistoric funerary monument typically constructed from a mound of loose stones, measuring ten metres in diameter. The same area also contains a ring-barrow, a related monument form consisting of a low earthen mound enclosed by a circular ditch or bank, both types generally associated with Bronze Age burial practice. The site was subject to a preservation order under the National Monuments Acts as far back as 1940, meaning that despite its invisibility it carries formal legal protection. The record was compiled by archaeologists Geraldine Stout and Padraig Clancy and last revised in 2018.
Slade Valley Golf Club is located near Brittas in south County Dublin, and the course itself is accessible to members and visitors in the normal way. There is nothing to see at ground level, which is precisely what makes the site so quietly peculiar. The preservation order applies regardless of the monument's visibility, and what lies beneath the turf near the third hole is protected in the same way as a standing stone or a fully excavated passage tomb. For anyone with an interest in the layered prehistory of the Dublin hills, the strangeness is in the knowing, in looking at an ordinary stretch of golf course and understanding that Bronze Age burial activity took place on this ground, that the hill was meaningful to someone long before the fairways were laid out.