The cairn at Pollacorragune, a roughly elongated pile of stone measuring four metres wide and a metre and a half high, is not the kind of monument that announces itself. There is no inscription, no formal enclosure, no interpretive board. What gives it weight is what people in the area have long believed about it: that beneath it lies St Benan.

Benan, also known as Benignus, is associated in Irish tradition with St Patrick, said to have been his psalmist and eventual successor as the leading figure of the Irish church. Whether or not the historical record supports a burial in Galway, the landscape around Kilbenan preserves his name and the pattern of early ecclesiastical settlement that often gathered around the memory of a founding saint. The cairn lies roughly 150 metres north of the early church site at Kilbenan, placing it within a cluster of features that together constitute the remains of what was once a significant religious site. A cairn of this type, a field monument built from gathered stone rather than cut masonry, is among the oldest and least adorned forms of burial marker in the Irish landscape, and the fact that this one has retained a local tradition of sanctity across centuries says something about how persistently such associations can cling to a place.