At Carran in the Burren, a low, grass-covered mound, roughly nine metres across and just 0.6 metres high, sits partly beneath the western boundary wall of Carran Graveyard and extends poorly preserved into the ground on the eastern side. It is one of five small cairns clustered around the graveyard, and between them they raise questions that have not been fully answered: were they simply the result of farmers clearing stone from the surrounding rough grazing, or do some of them mark something older and more deliberate?

The antiquarian T.J. Westropp, writing between 1900 and 1902, noted that south of Carran Church there was a small cairn around which coffins were carried, a funeral circuit of the kind once practised at early ecclesiastical sites across Ireland. This cairn is almost certainly the one marked as "Carn" on the Ordnance Survey six-inch maps, and it is possible that at least two of the five mounds served as penitential stations, places where pilgrims would walk or pray in an act of physical devotion associated with the nearby church. Westropp also reported, separately, that a cist, a small prehistoric stone-lined burial box, had been covered by a cairn somewhere in the Carran townland, though no cist is now visible in any of the five mounds. By the time Annabel Swinfen was researching her 1992 survey of Burren church sites, the coffin-carrying custom had already been forgotten, its disappearance unrecorded and undated.