The Cavan Burren
The Cavan Burren is a limestone plateau on the slopes of the
Cuilcagh Mountains of west Cavan. Not to be mixed up with its distant relative the
Clare Burren, the Cavan Burren is probably Ireland’s finest relict landscape or,
put more simply, our best outdoor rock museum.
Its stony attractions range from embedded fossils of a 350 million-year-old
tropical sea to glacial erratics (enormous boulders) left behind during the last
Ice Age, from the megalithic wedge tombs of the Bronze Age to 19th-century shelter
walls. Basically, if it involved rocks and it happened in Ireland, you’ll
probably find an example of it here.
While many of these sights might escape the average untrained
eye, one of the most interesting features, for the amateurs amongst us, is the Calf
House Dolmen. Part-megalithic monument, part-farm animal shelter, the Calf House
Dolmen is what looks like it would have been a hugely impressive portal tomb, had
it been finished. Instead, either due to an accident or an industrial dispute, the
final wall is missing and the roof has been left leaning up from the ground.
Though seemingly incomplete as a portal tomb, its design did
provide the opportunity to some local farmer, many centuries later, who used its
angle to threw a few blocks up inside it to make it into a very inviting shelter
for farm animals. So while it might not now be visually as inspiring as its Clare
Burren cousin, the Poulnabrone Dolmen, it is every bit as cute.
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