Standing Stone in Loughcrew Cairn L

High on Carnbane West at Loughcrew, Cairn L remains one of the most complete passage tombs on the western hill. The cairn measures about 41 metres across and encloses a cruciform chamber with seven side recesses and many carved stones. Few Irish passage tombs still open today contain a freestanding pillar inside the burial chamber, yet Cairn L does. The tall limestone monolith stands next to a large stone basin close to the main end recess, separate from the upright slabs that define the chamber walls. Every other structural stone in the tomb is brown sandstone, so the pale blue limestone of the pillar is immediately noticeable.

The passage was also built with the sun in mind. On mornings near Samhain in early November and Imbolc in early February, the first light of day reaches deep into the chamber and falls across the basin, the standing stone, and the decorated stones at the far end.

Martin Brennan was among the first to recognise the astronomical significance of the monolith, showing that the cross-quarter sunrise strikes the six-foot stone directly as light moves through the chamber. More on the Cairn L sunrise alignment ...

Loughcrew Cairn L was excavated by Eugene Conwell in 1865

After the interior chambers had been cleared of all the loose stones, which had filled them up, on Tuesday evening, 19th September, 1865, in presence of Mr. Naper, Mr. Hamilton, Archbishop Errington, and a number of ladies, we turned up this remarkable stone basin, and beneath it were revealed to view several splinters of charred and blackened bones, with about a dozen small pieces of charcoal lying in various directions.

On carefully picking the damp stiff earth underneath it, we found embedded in it upwards of 900 pieces of charred bones; forty-eight human teeth in a very perfect state of preservation; the pointed end of a bone pin, five and a quarter inches long, and a quarter of an inch thick; a fragment, about an inch in length, of a similar bone pin a most perfectly rounded syenite ball, still preserving its original polish two and three-quarter inches in diameter.

Another perfectly round stone ball, streaked with white and purple layers, and about an inch in diameter; another stone ball, upwards of three-quarters of an inch in diameter, of a brown colour, dashed with dark spots; a finely-polished jet-like object, oval in shape, an inch and a quarter in length, and three-quarters of an inch broad; eight white balls (carbonate of lime), which had become quite soft; but which gradually dried, on exposure, to a sufficient degree of hardness to enable us to take them away in a tolerable state of preservation.