ryaner

Very difficult to make out what we have here. Recorded under the cover-all category of ‘mound’ (there is a reference to it on excavations.ie as Corduff mound), it’s been hacked into on its north-west arc. Very overgrown and in a swampy corner of a field in a housing estate, we could barely make it out in the low evening sun and the decaying vegetation. I guess about 2 metres high and maybe 25 in diameter.

Now a traffic island in a car park in an industrial estate, this mound has been rounded off and prettified. I couldn’t find any excavation notes, surprising as I would have thought an excavation was called for when working so close to a national monument. It’s over 3 metres tall and about 50 metres diameter.

In the Holmswood housing estate in Cabinteely, the standing stone was moved to its present location during building works in 1993. There had been doubts as to whether it was of prehistoric provenance, but upon excavation “... directly in front of the standing stone, on the hillslope side, two small fragments of cremated human bone [were found]. There were no other finds or features but the stone is certainly prehistoric.”

Now about 150 metres away from its original location, the stone has been set in concrete and surrounded by inward-facing, wooden pallisades, in a cobbled ‘courtyard’. Quite considerable thought and expense were put into this by the developer and I have to say that it’s really rather nice.

I had seen this on archaeology.ie and it was on my list. I had a fare to here the other night and spied it as I was dropping her. I asked her whether she knew if it was ancient or not and she shrugged no, but said that she and her friends had played on the pallisades when they were kids. Worth a look if you are visiting Glendruid nearby.

I don’t know what I expected to find here today, but you always live in hope at this game. Well, there ain’t no cist here no more, and even though it may seem like a wasted journey, it wasn’t entirely: I got to see (or rather stop and see as I’ve ‘seen’ it many times) Edward Lovett Pearce’s monstrous 1727 obelisk. I wondered if the stones of the cist ended up in the structure of a renovated base, but no, the crude base is part of the original (see archiseek.com/2012/1727-obelisk-newtown-park-stillorgan-co-dublin/#.UnGUHI3eoy4 for a contemporary painting).

There is an excavation report that I’d like to get my hands on, when I can stump up the 50 blips (see miscellaneous below).

Highlight of the day (and we still took in the magnificent Dowth henge) and a wonderful surprise, I don’t know how to classify this. There’s an ancient pond and this has been enclosed by a bank, well over 2 metres high in places, like you might see in classic henge construction.

I pondered (excuse the pun) the purpose for quite a while, thinking of ritual drownings (recent reading about iron-age and neolithic sacrifices encouraging my more morbid imaginings) or some sort of neolithic baptism or ritual bathing, with punters lining the sides of the enclosure in awe and reverence. I mean, why else enclose the place?

There’s a ditch very visible on the outside to the east. The bank is at its highest on the western arc. There’s an entrance to the north where the stream that feeds the pond cuts through the bank and there are signs of another entrance on the eastern side. I’d like to go back here in say January, when all the growth will have died away and the construction would be more visible. A real treat this.

On the eastern side of the road of the site of the Battle of the Boyne, not 300 metres above the river, are 2 standing stones and a double chambered souterrain. The easier accessible stone is little more than a scratching post, a metre tall and square in profile. The other stone is is the adjoining field to the south.

The souterrain has now been filled in, with just some corbelling and a capstone visible in one of the chambers.

I was browsing the National Monuments Database at webgis.archaeology.ie/NationalMonuments/FlexViewer/ recently and zoomed in on Burren in north-west Cavan. There looked to be a lot more sites marked there than when I’d last visited. In fact, there are 16 separate entries for rock art alone, each with a description. Someone has been busy!

I’ve a friend living in Cavan town, so a two birds with one stone murder seemed like a plan. It’s still a fair old hike to Burren from his nest though, almost the full length of the county, but it is beautiful country. Cuilcagh mountain needs to be circumvented, south on fairly uneven roads, or north, through Fermanagh and back into Cavan at Blacklion. We took the southern route.

The source of the Shannon, the Shannon Pot, is nearby but we kept going as we were late and I wanted to see as much as I could. The Burren archaeological trail is still under construction and there is work ongoing in the forest, including the felling of trees. The first signed site is the portal tomb in the trees on the right.

Next is a piece of rock art – this I hadn’t seen before on my two previous trips. It’s a split boulder with faint cupmarks, some which seem to be in a rosette formation.

From there we moved on to the signed “Unclassified megalithic tomb”. One large capstone-like flag has collapsed over a supposed chamber. Three very worked, almost squares profiled stones lie around it, two in a position that could lead you to believe that this is a simple wedge tomb of the Burren, Co. Clare type.

Further on up the track we came to the Calf House portal tomb. The capstone of this has to be in the top ten of Irish dolmen capstones. Its huge weight has caused the structure to partially collapse and the whole thing is kept semi-erect by modern walling. Both portal stones are now free-standing and impressive megaliths in themselves.

Moving swiftly on we headed over to the Giant’s Leap wedge tomb, east of the portal, down a small gully and up the other side to a flat-topped ridge. This is the show tomb in Burren, and that’s saying something given what else is on offer. As part of the ongoing works, the trees that enclosed this have mostly been felled and the views opened up. Lough Macnean can be spied to the north. The wedge tomb itself can be seen for a good distance from the west. This has to be one of the best examples of this class of tomb in Ireland, still having much of its structure and all of its roofstones. The nearest comparison I can give is with Moylisha in Wicklow.

With very little time and daylight left we headed back over the valley to the boulder burial and its attendant rock art. There are at least 5 marked stones here, two of which I found and photographed. One is a double, conjoined cup and ring motif, the other a simple cup and ring mark.

There’s much more about to be discovered but alas we hadn’t the time. You could pass a very busy full day here in Burren, Co. Cavan and probably still not have completed all there is to see. A great place and highly recommended.

Another enigmatic suburban Dublin mound, this time in salubrious Foxrock. It’s in an estate just to the left off Westminster Road as you come in from the N11. The developers bypassed the mound and wheeled their road around the back (south) side of the monument when they built the estate.

Like the tumulus in Coolock this is tree covered. However, unlike Coolock, access is simple as it sits on the edge of a public green space in the Cairn Hill estate. It’s oval shaped (longer axis being east-west, about 20 metres long), about 2 metres high and reminds me of a barrow. It seems much higher on the south side, but this is because of the previous mentioned road construction.

I visited on a work day in the lashings of rain and took the accompanying shots with my iphone. I’d thought of coming here for quite a while but had procrastinated, thinking if there was anything here, access would be impossible. Not so.

Easy to find down a laneway in this townland, it’s a large boulder, over a metre high with the large basin cut into the top of the stone.

The water was rancid in the .35 of a metre diameter .17 of a metre deep bowl. I was taken aback by, on arrival, my companion immersing both hands into the bowl and stirring up the stink. I asked him why he did that and he said because I can. Good enough.

Small cairn in this megalith rich townland, about 2 metres high and oval shaped, north-south on its longer axis. Some of the material is being eroded away by animal hooves, but we couldn’t make out any structural material. One for completists only.

The sea mist made visibility here on the day we visited near impossible, down to about 20 yards. There’s another cairn in an adjacent field but we couldn’t get access to it (we didn’t try that hard).

This cairn has been very much robbed of its material, in the process of which 3 cists were uncovered and excavated. The cairn has since been left alone.

The northern cist is a classic box, with six flagstones making up the structure. There’s a small hole at the top western corner and I stuck my hand in and took a few shots. It was a tad unnerving, given that the cist would make a perfect hidey-hole for various critters. Another cist is visible towards the centre of the mound, but not as accessible as the northern one. We never found the third amongst the vegetation.