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A cairn marking a mountain summit in Graubünden, Switzerland. The biggest cairn in Ireland, Maeve's Cairn on Knocknarea. A cairn is a human-made pile (or stack) of stones raised for a purpose, usually as a marker or as a burial mound. The word cairn comes from the Scottish Gaelic: càrn [ˈkʰaːrˠn̪ˠ] (plural càirn [ˈkʰaːrˠɲ]). [1]
A chambered cairn is a burial monument, usually constructed during the Neolithic, consisting of a sizeable (usually stone) chamber around and over which a cairn of stones was constructed. Some chambered cairns are also passage-graves. They are found throughout Britain and Ireland, with the largest number in Scotland.
Quoyness chambered cairn is located on the Elsness peninsula, on the island of Sanday in Orkney. It is a large, oval Maeshowe type chambered cairn, probably built around 3000 BC. The cairn sits on a wide, oval-shaped stone platform and was built with a mix of stones, earth and waste material intermixed with horizontal slabs.
The court cairn or court tomb is a megalithic type of chambered cairn or gallery grave. During the period, 3900–3500 BC, more than 390 court cairns were built in Ireland and over 100 in southwest Scotland. The Neolithic (New Stone Age) monuments are identified by an uncovered courtyard connected to one or more roofed and partitioned burial ...
The cairn was constructed by two dry stone master 'dykers', Norman Haddow and William Crooks Cassidy, and was a gift to the Queen from her Scottish Warrant Holders and current and former employees of Balmoral. [5] The cairn is marked with an etched slate plaque with the Queen's initials and the date, made by carver Gillian Forbes. [5]
A typical clearance cairn from Eglinton Country Park in Scotland. A clearance cairn is an irregular and unstructured collection of fieldstones which have been removed from arable land or pasture to allow for more effective agriculture and collected into a usually low mound or cairn.
The Bridestones is a chambered cairn, near Congleton, Cheshire, England, that was constructed in the Neolithic period about 3500–2400 BC. [1] It was described in 1764 as being 120 yards (110 m) long and 12 yards (11 m) wide, containing three separate compartments, of which only one remains today.
Cairnholy (or Cairn Holy) is the site of two Neolithic chambered tombs of the Clyde type. [1] It is located 4 kilometres east of the village of Carsluith in Dumfries and Galloway, Scotland. The tombs are scheduled monuments in the care of Historic Scotland. The name Cairnholy represents Gaelic *Càrn na h-ulaidhe ‘cairn of the stone tomb’. [2]