Cairn, Crumlin, Co. Clare

Co. Clare |

Cairns

Cairn, Crumlin, Co. Clare

On the north-western shoulder of Knockaunmountain in County Clare, somewhere between the 600 and 700 foot contours, a loose pile of stones sits quietly in the landscape, neither obviously ancient nor obviously modern.

It is the kind of feature that a walker might step around without a second thought, yet it sits within a large field system of its own antiquity, on ground that looks out across a wide sweep of country to the west and north-west.

The cairn itself is irregularly shaped, measuring roughly 4.2 metres east to west and 2.8 metres north to south. It is not symmetrical: the eastern and southern sides rise only to about 0.8 metres, while the western and northern edges reach a maximum of 1.2 metres. Beneath the loose stones is a slightly raised base, covered in heather and standing about 0.5 metres high, and at the western end there appear to be earthfast stones, that is, stones set into the ground rather than simply piled on top of it, rising to around 0.4 metres. Cairns of this kind, stone mounds built up over time by human hands, appear throughout the Irish uplands in a variety of forms and periods, serving purposes that range from burial and ritual to boundary marking and land clearance. The presence of earthfast stones here hints at something more deliberate than casual stone-dumping, though no firm date or function has been established for this particular example. That ambiguity is part of what makes it worth noting.

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Pete F
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