What is recorded here

Knockacarrigeen still holds a broken oval cairn beside a later ringfort, proving that people kept returning to the same high ground across centuries. The hilltop crowd may have marked death, ownership or prayer, yet later hands chopped through the stones to build a defensive wall. Aerial shadows hint that a second cairn once stood nearby, now reduced to small scattered heaps. The place records human ambition and forgetting: first they piled stones upward, then they took them downward for survival.

In NW quadrant of a hilltop ericlosure (GA043-033006-) on the summit of Knockacarrigeen, a large hill to E of Knockmaa (GA042-064002-). A very poorly preserved oval cairn (NE-SW 21m, NW-SE 16m, H c. 1.5m) much disturbed and interrupted by the walls of a later ringfort (GA043-033002-) which lies immediately ESE. Two small cairns to NE are possibly derived from field clearance, though aerial photography (ASGAP 384:40; 385:6) suggests that they may occupy the site of a second, robbed cairn. (Byrne and Gosling 1988, 138-41; CUCAP ATF 21) The above description is derived from the published 'Archaeological Inventory of County Galway Vol. II - North Galway'. Compiled by Olive Alcock, Kathy de hÓra and Paul Gosling (Dublin: Stationery Office, 1999). Date of upload: 05 August 2010

A Neolithic cairn; poorly preserved and of uncertain specific type. Its location on a prominent hilltop suggests ritual or territorial significance.

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