Cairn, Slievenaglasha, Co. Clare

Co. Clare |

Cairns

Cairn, Slievenaglasha, Co. Clare

On the summit of Glasgeivnagh Hill in County Clare, nine ancient cairns sit in a loose procession along the ridge, a concentration of prehistoric stone mounds that most walkers in the Burren would never suspect existed.

This particular cairn, the largest known in the cluster, is a subcircular mound roughly fourteen metres across from north to south and twelve from east to west, rising to a height of 1.6 metres at its south-western edge. It sits in rough pasture above a cliff face some sixty-five metres below to the south-east, on ground that is semi-karst in character, meaning the underlying limestone gives the landscape its fractured, porous quality so familiar elsewhere in the Burren.

Cairns, in the broadest sense, are accumulations of stone heaped over or around burials, ritual sites, or territorial markers, typically dating from the Neolithic or Bronze Age. What makes this one quietly interesting is the layering of human use visible within a single mound. The main body of the cairn contains cavities of various sizes, some of them conjoined, in its northern and southern sectors, suggesting disturbance or partial collapse over a very long period. At the summit, a later build-up of stone surrounds a modern trigonometrical station, that familiar concrete pillar used by Ordnance Survey teams to fix precise geographical coordinates. And leaning against the south-western flank is a later animal pen, built from loose stone in the manner of countless small enclosures across the Irish uplands. The hill was already recognised as a place of significance by the late nineteenth century: the Ordnance Survey marked and named the mounds as 'Carns' on both the 1897 twenty-five-inch plan and the 1920 edition of the six-inch map. The cairn also sits within a large multiperiod field system, suggesting that the ground around it has been managed and reworked across many different eras.

The site is reached across rough upland pasture, and the surrounding field system, along with the other eight cairns strung along the same hilltop, repays a slow approach. The cavities in the mound's northern and southern sectors are visible at ground level, and the contrast between the ancient stone core and the later Ordnance Survey pillar at the crown gives a clear sense of how repeatedly this particular high point has been put to practical use.

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