Cairn - burial cairn, Poulnaskagh, Co. Clare
Co. Clare |
Cairns
On a broad limestone plateau at Poulnaskagh in County Clare, a low mound of roughly stacked stones sits in rough pasture, easy to overlook and easier still to misread.
It measures just over ten metres north to south and just under ten metres east to west, rising to about a metre at its south-eastern edge. That modest profile conceals a fairly precise piece of prehistoric construction. This is a burial cairn, a mound raised over the dead, and the details visible at ground level suggest it was laid out with more care than its current condition implies.
At the cairn's heart, slightly north-west of centre, lies a cist, a small stone-lined box grave of the kind used across Ireland and Britain during the Bronze Age to hold a single burial, often accompanied by a pottery vessel or personal objects. Around the eastern side of this cist, six kerbstones survive in a curving, non-continuous line. They are modest in size, averaging roughly forty centimetres long and around thirty centimetres high, but their positioning is suggestive: if the arc were extended to complete the circuit on the western side, these stones would form an oval kerb of around three and a half to four metres across, enclosing the cist within the larger cairn. In the northern part of the mound, a separate line of small upright flagstones, running about two metres in length, may be lodged in a gryke, a natural fissure in the underlying limestone of the kind common across the Burren landscape. Whether this line is structural, incidental, or something in between is not entirely clear. The whole cairn sits within what has been identified as a multiperiod field system, meaning the landscape around it saw repeated use across different eras, with the cairn itself one layer among several accumulated over centuries. A ravine runs roughly north-north-east to south-south-west about fifty metres to the east, giving the plateau a natural edge that may have influenced how this spot was chosen in the first place.
