Cairn, Slievenaglasha, Co. Clare

Co. Clare |

Cairns

Cairn, Slievenaglasha, Co. Clare

On a hilltop in County Clare, nine prehistoric cairns line the ridge of Glasgeivnagh Hill in a loose procession that has gone largely unnoticed by the wider world.

This particular cairn, one of the nine, sits near the summit of what geologists would describe as semi-karst terrain, where the underlying limestone gives the landscape its fractured, uneven character. The ground falls sharply to a cliff some sixty metres to the south-east, and the cairn itself occupies rough pasture within a large field system that was in use across multiple periods of prehistory. A cairn, in its simplest form, is a mound of stones raised over a burial or used as a territorial or ritual marker, and this one measures roughly ten metres east to west and eight and a half metres north to south, rising to just one metre at its highest southern point before flattening out almost entirely at the north.

By the time the antiquarian T. J. Westropp visited in 1913, he found the monument already compromised, recording it in his notes as a 'defaced little carn'. The damage he observed, specifically to the north-east side of a raised subcircular stone concentration near the cairn's edge, had evidently occurred well before his arrival. That stone concentration, still standing around 0.6 metres high, is the most visually distinct feature remaining. The cairn appears on the Ordnance Survey's 1897 twenty-five-inch plan and again on the 1920 edition of the six-inch map, where it is marked and named 'Carn', suggesting it was a recognised feature of the local landscape long before any formal archaeological interest was taken in it. Its presence within a larger multiperiod field system hints at a hilltop that was returned to, built upon, and reorganised across a very long span of human activity.

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