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Piperstown Hill – Heather, gorse, bog and… stones

Finished mowing the gardens at half eight tonight. I couldn't resist heading out somewhere, and where better than Piperstown? It's a 5 or 6 minute drive from my house, the OS map says it has 3 cairns on its southern side and there is only a small amount of data about it on TMA and megalithomania.com.

I must admit at this stage that I'm a little out of my depth here. I don't know what I saw up there but I'm convinced of quite a bit of prehistoric activity. I left the map in the car and headed in the direction of the cairns, this time just me and sprout. The light was fading fast so I had to be quick. There is a lot of rock strewn will-nilly about place and I had to stop myself from checking every one. Then, out of the corner of my eye, I spied this foot and a half high piece of perfection. The pictures I am posting of it don't do it justice. It's a 3 sided pyramid and looks a little like the eggs out of the movie Alien. Maybe a little too perfect, but who knows? It's embedded in the earth and the grass has grown quite high up its side.

At this stage I had wandered off away from the direction of the putative cairns. Then, at the bottom of a burnt out area, I saw this smallish mound of stones. I headed for it and investigated. It seemed that this was just a pile of stones. I had mentioned my new-found interest in things magalithic to a hill-walker friend of mine and he had reminded me of the tradition of placing a stone on a pile, or cairn as he called it, on the summit of a mountain that you had just climbed. I thought maybe that's what this was but it wasn't on the summit. In fact it was close to the spot that's marked on the map as having a cairn. Looking around the mound there was some stones embedded in the earth and that looked distinctly like kerbing.

Perplexed, I headed up the hill to catch the sun setting. On the summit there are tons of stones but I didn't have time to really check them out. I was itching to see if I could find the other 2 'cairns', so I headed back down. The sun was now behind the hill and the light was really bad but I found what I think are the other 2, really just 2 overgrown mounds with some possible kerbing.

Happy with what I had seen I headed back to the car. I decided to head back around the long way, up onto Military Road and down through Kilakee back to Ballycragh. My stone radar was on and as I headed up the road, about 100 metres from the Military Road junction, I spotted a pair of stones by the side of the road that screamed "investigate". I'm reading The Modern Antiquarian at the moment and am on the chapter on the Recumbent stone circles of Dunnideer and Aberdeenshire. I need to post the shots somewhere to see if I've 'found' something, as it looks a lot to me like that this pair could be a recumbent and a one of its flankers.

Piperstown — Images

23.05.06ce
<b>Piperstown</b>Posted by ryaner<b>Piperstown</b>Posted by ryaner<b>Piperstown</b>Posted by ryaner<b>Piperstown</b>Posted by ryaner<b>Piperstown</b>Posted by ryaner
ryaner Posted by ryaner
23rd May 2006ce


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