I must see that cairn then!!

"I reckon St. Patrick did not rid Ireland of snakes but of Serpent Cults"

Oh yeah, it makes sense. What the hell, those 'snake cults' that the church erased were only simplistic and silly representations of the earlier faith; the ancient world must have been full of representations of snakes as well as other spiritual beings and animals. Still, legends retain continuous references to those particular animals in our collective memory.

It is interesting you say the pillar was the foundation for the creation of a later cairn, as most people would tend to think the pillar was put there after it. I agree with you, most archaeologists seem to forget this aspect of continuation, to the extent that many of the big passage graves may have been made up of menhirs or other sacred most ancient paraphernalia, a kind of Ur-recycling of Ur-cults.

As I was told recently by a researcher, 'stone was never wasted in ancient times', in fact, until very recently. Nothing was wasted in any case. Wastefuckers and timewasters are a totally modern phenomenon.