Cairn - radial-stone cairn, Behagullane, Co. Cork

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Cairn – radial-stone cairn, Behagullane, Co. Cork

In a rough pasture in Behagullane, tucked between two natural knolls of outcropping rock, a low cairn sits with eleven thin stone slabs radiating outward from its edge like the spokes of a wheel half-buried in the ground.

This arrangement, known as a radial-stone cairn, is an uncommon variant of the more familiar Bronze Age burial mound, and the effect on the ground is quietly arresting: a broad, shallow dome of earth and rubble, just half a metre high and seven and a half metres across, fringed by slabs that lean and protrude at the perimeter, each one modest in size but deliberate in placement.

What makes the site particularly interesting is its relationship to the landscape around it. Roughly sixteen metres to the northwest lies a stone row, a type of prehistoric monument found across the uplands of Cork and Kerry, typically consisting of a line of standing stones whose precise ritual or astronomical function remains debated. The proximity of the cairn to the stone row suggests the two formed part of a connected ceremonial or funerary landscape, though the exact nature of that relationship is not recorded. The eleven radially set slabs are thin, ranging from about ten to thirty centimetres in height and up to seventy centimetres in length, giving the cairn a low, almost flush profile that could easily be missed in long grass.

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Pete F
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