Cairn, Tooreen More, Co. Cork
Co. Cork |
Cairns
On the southern slopes of the Slieve Miskish Mountains in west Cork, there is a cairn, a burial mound of heaped stone typically raised during the Bronze Age, that exists more convincingly on paper than it does on the ground.
The site has not been located in the field, which places it in a curious category: recorded, drawn, and catalogued, yet effectively vanished.
What survives is a drawing by Somerville of University College Cork, which captured the cairn at some point before the record was formalised in the 1992 Archaeological Inventory of County Cork. That drawing is now among the more substantial pieces of evidence that the structure ever existed at all. Whether it was robbed for field walls, swallowed by vegetation, or simply missed during subsequent surveys, no one has been able to say with certainty. The Slieve Miskish Mountains occupy the Beara Peninsula, a landscape already dense with prehistoric remains, which makes the loss of even one site quietly frustrating to those who study the area.

