Cairn, Noughaval, Co. Clare

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Cairns

Cairn, Noughaval, Co. Clare

In the limestone landscape of Noughaval in County Clare, a grass-covered mound sits quietly in rough grazing land, unrecognised by the official records that account for most of Ireland's prehistoric monuments.

It was not listed in either the Sites and Monuments Record or the Record of Monuments and Places as of 1996, which means it passed through decades of formal survey work without being noted at all. That absence is itself a small curiosity: a cairn of roughly fifteen metres in diameter is not an insignificant structure, yet it remained off the map until relatively recently.

The mound is a cairn, a type of prehistoric burial or memorial monument typically constructed from heaped stone and, in this case, now so thickly covered in grass and vegetation that its origins are easy to miss at a glance. It sits among hazel scrub, rough pasture, and exposed karst, the bare fractured limestone pavement that characterises much of the Burren region. Crossing the mound is a drystone wall running roughly west-northwest to east-southeast, a later addition that whoever built it apparently laid without particular regard for whatever lay beneath. It was Dr Sharon Parr who identified the site and photographed it in September 2012, bringing it into the recorded landscape for the first time.

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