Clearance cairn

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. Commonly of Bronze Age origins, these cairns may be part of a cairnfield (a collection of closely spaced cairns) where some cairns might be funerary.[1] Clearance cairns are a worldwide phenomenon wherever organised agriculture has been practised.[2][page needed]

  1. ^ "CAIRNFIELD". English Heritage Dictionary. Archived from the original on 12 September 2007. Retrieved 1 February 2009.
  2. ^ Feldman, Louis H.; Hata, Gohei (1989). Josephus, the Bible, and History. Leiden, Netherlands: Brill Publishers. p. ??. ISBN 90-04-08931-4.