Cairn, Kilcoona, Co. Galway

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Cairns

Cairn, Kilcoona, Co. Galway

On a low rise in the grasslands of Kilcoona in County Galway, there is a monument that requires some patience to see.

What was once a cairn, a mound of stones heaped up in prehistory, has been so thoroughly stripped by centuries of field clearance that what remains is little more than a slight swelling in the earth, roughly 23 metres across, its edges defined by a faint degraded scarp. The stones themselves are gone, absorbed into the walls and field boundaries of the surrounding farmland. Only the shape of the ground remembers what stood here.

Early Ordnance Survey mapping helps fill in what the landscape no longer shows. Both the first edition and the 1920 third edition of the OS six-inch maps recorded an irregularly shaped cairn at this location, oriented roughly northwest to southeast at around 20 metres and northeast to southwest at around 10 metres. That record is now more informative than the site itself. The broader area around Kilcoona appears to have seen considerable agricultural activity over the generations, and this cairn is far from the only casualty. A comparable monument survives approximately 240 metres to the southeast, and the proximity of the two suggests this part of north Galway once held a more substantial prehistoric presence than the current emptiness of the fields implies.

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Pete F
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