Cairn, Slievenaglasha, Co. Clare

Co. Clare |

Cairns

Cairn, Slievenaglasha, Co. Clare

On the summit ridge of Glasgeivnagh Hill in County Clare, nine prehistoric cairns sit in a loose procession, and most people who know about even one of them are few and far between.

This particular cairn, roughly subcircular and measuring nine metres north to south by seven metres east to west, rises to between one and 1.6 metres in height, its edges defined by kerbstones set along its perimeter. A stone slab standing on edge in the north-eastern sector may be the remains of a cist, a small stone-lined burial box of the kind commonly associated with Bronze Age interments. The land around it is rough pasture, and the hill itself is semi-karst in character, meaning the underlying limestone has been shaped over millennia by water dissolving through it, producing the fractured, fissured terrain typical of this part of Clare. To the south-east, the ground drops sharply to a cliff some 65 metres below.

The cairn was recorded as early as the 1897 Ordnance Survey 25-inch plan, where it was marked with hachuring and labelled simply "Carn", and it appeared again on the 1920 edition of the OS 6-inch map. T. J. Westropp, the Clare antiquarian who documented much of the county's archaeological landscape in the early twentieth century, noted in 1913 that the cairn had already been damaged by that point, though its kerbing was still visible. The cairn sits within a large multiperiod field system on the hillside, suggesting the landscape around it has been organised and reorganised by successive communities across a very long span of time. The cluster of nine cairns along this single hilltop, all recorded together, implies the ridge held some sustained ceremonial or commemorative significance for the people who built and used them.

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