Cairn - ring-cairn, Coumaraglinmountain, Co. Waterford

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Cairns

Cairn – ring-cairn, Coumaraglinmountain, Co. Waterford

At the base of a steep, north-westward-facing slope in the Monavullagh Mountains of County Waterford, a large boulder sits at the centre of a carefully arranged ring of stones. The boulder itself, roughly one and a half metres across and partly swallowed by heather, is encircled by a band of cairn material about five metres in outer diameter, with an intentional gap left open to the north-east. A small upright stone, only forty centimetres tall, marks the eastern edge of that opening. The deliberate orientation of the gap, and the presence of a marker stone at its threshold, suggest this was never simply a heap of cleared field stones.

A ring-cairn is a prehistoric funerary or ritual monument in which a kerbed or walled ring of stone and rubble encloses a central space, sometimes covering a burial, sometimes not. The form is found across Ireland and Britain and is generally associated with the Bronze Age, though dating individual examples without excavation is difficult. This particular cairn forms part of a broader complex of monuments at Coumaraglinmountain, a grouping recognised under the National Monuments (Preservation) Order No. 4 of 1996, which brought the site under state protection. The details of the structure were recorded in the Archaeological Inventory of County Waterford, published in 1999, placing it within a wider effort to document prehistoric remains across the county.

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Pete F
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