Cairn, Glennaskagh, Co. Tipperary
Co. Tipperary |
Cairns
On the 500-metre summit of Knockahunna, a prehistoric cairn, which is a mound of stones raised over a burial or as a landscape marker, sits beneath something rather more recent: a small concrete cabin, roughly two metres square, sealed with an iron door, with the sawn-off stumps of television masts still jutting from concrete bases around its edges.
The iron box to one side is thought to have housed a battery. Whatever signal the 1980s installation once broadcast, it has long since gone quiet, and what remains is an oddly layered object, ancient and mundane at once.
The cairn itself is a sub-oval mound measuring approximately 14 metres northeast to southwest and 9.5 metres northwest to southeast, rising to a maximum height of 1.4 metres. It sits in open heather with commercial forestry pressing in from the northwest, and has been cut into on two sides, once by a field boundary and once by a trackway. The site was formally identified by Con Manning in May 1995. It does not stand entirely alone on this upland: a cairn on Sheegounna lies roughly a kilometre to the south-southeast, and another on the better-known summit of Slievenamon lies around two kilometres to the south-southwest, suggesting that this stretch of Tipperary upland was once marked out with some deliberateness by whoever raised these monuments.
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