Cairn, Gortlahard, Co. Kerry

Co. Kerry |

Cairns

Cairn, Gortlahard, Co. Kerry

On a south-facing slope above the valley of the Sheen River in south-west Kerry, three cairns sit within roughly thirty to forty metres of one another, close enough that they are clearly not coincidental.

The one at the centre of this cluster is small and oval, measuring about two and a half metres north to south and under two metres east to west, rising only around forty centimetres above the ground. It is easy to walk past without registering it as anything more than a slight rise in rough pasture.

What makes it worth pausing over is what surrounds it and what it sits in. The basal stones of the cairn, the lowest course of the mound's construction, are visible where they protrude through accumulated peat, suggesting that the structure has been here long enough for the bog to grow up around it rather than the other way around. There is also what appears to be a revetment on the south-east to west arc, meaning a line of stones used to retain and define the edge of the mound, a feature that points to deliberate construction rather than a casual pile of field clearance. Cairns of this kind are generally understood as prehistoric funerary monuments, though not all can be confirmed as such without excavation. The presence of a relict field boundary in the immediate vicinity complicates the picture slightly, raising the possibility that the landscape here has been worked and reworked across several different periods, with the cairn predating the agricultural boundaries that grew up around it, or perhaps existing alongside them.

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Pete F
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