The Burren: ‘Wedge Tomb’…

County Clare, Wednesday, 27th July 2022…

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The presence of Skull Rock

is probably responsible for the number

of ‘tombs’ in the field across the track, which is now a road,

of which there are, reputedly, a goodly number.

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It is a little vaunted fact that many of the human remains

discovered at ancient monuments were deposited

long after the sites were constructed?

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And that is a question well worth pondering…

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The bones of an adult and child were recovered from this one,

yet it is still difficult not to wonder what type of adult and child

and if they met their end together, and if so, then just how?

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The debri that now litters

the interior and the exterior

of the site is the remains of the cairn

which once covered the ‘tomb’.

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The tuft of grass on top

suggests that even here the cairn

might have eventually become a mound.

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Is it a train or a wake?…

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Unfortunately, you do not get to decide!

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The symbolic preoccupation of all these structures seems to be with Headlands, which comprise the end of the land and the start of the sea…

Or Mountain peaks which would be the end of the land and the start of the sky.

And by extension with islands which is land situated in the sea, and, as we have seen, with birds which are beings that fly in the sky.

In other words, the builders of these structures are concerned with thresholds and what lies beyond those thresholds in the domains which they bound.

The analogy always involves the natural environment, which is then related to their, and hence to our, own experience.

So, it is not so much from here to eternity but rather from here to our apparently limited horizons and then on beyond them…

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Lands of Exile:

KITH ‘N’ KIN

Stuart France & Sue Vincent

The Beeley Stone, ‘liberated’ from the churchyard at Bakewell, stands proudly in the centre of its village green once more. While the locals enjoy the fruits of its restoration, Ben, who had led the daring raid against authority, still languishes in jail.

Don and Wen, arrested and released without explanation in Ireland, now plot an erratic course through the wild places of Wales, while Jaw-Dark and Kraas, seeking the legendary stone of Fergus Mac Roy, have been separated in the most uncanny of circumstances…

As the darkness closes around them, the Black Shade haunts the moors above Beeley and, in the shadowy rooms of the old tower, an ancient and even stranger story begins to unfold…

Available via Amazon UK, Amazon.com and worldwide,

for Kindle and full colour illustrated paperback.