Cairn, Cúil Na Gcopóg, Co. Kerry
Co. Kerry |
Cairns
At Cúil Na Gcopóg in County Kerry, a site once considered archaeologically significant has quietly ceased to exist.
Recorded on the Fair Plan simply as "Stones" and described by the landowner at the time as a pile of stones, it was later classified as a cairn, though the designation was always uncertain. It has since been removed entirely, leaving behind a location that is now notable mainly for the ambiguity of what it ever was.
The honest truth about this site is that nobody was quite sure what they were looking at. A field clearance cairn is exactly what the name suggests: a mound of stones gathered from surrounding land by farmers clearing ground for agriculture, with no ceremonial or funerary purpose at all. Across Ireland and particularly on the Dingle Peninsula, where the landscape has been worked for millennia, such accumulations are common, and distinguishing them from prehistoric burial cairns can be genuinely difficult without excavation. The site appears in J. Cuppage's 1986 archaeological survey of the Corca Dhuibhne region, a comprehensive catalogue of the Dingle Peninsula's extraordinary density of ancient monuments, where it was listed with appropriate caution. That caution now seems well placed. Whatever the stones represented, they are gone.