Cairns

Cairns are piles of deliberately stacked stones. While the popular image of a cairn is conical or columnar in shape, they may, in fact, appear in a variety of formations, including rings, rectangles, U shapes, and round or oval mounds that are wider than they are tall. They range in height from just a few inches to up to forty feet; the Newgrange monument in County Meath, Ireland, for example, is a passage tomb covered by a mound-shaped cairn that is about 39 feet (12 meters) high and 249 feet (76 meters) across. The main characteristics of cairns are that they are built by humans, not natural features of the landscape, and they are held together solely by gravity, with no mortar or other fixative used in their construction.

Throughout history, cairns have been used for various purposes, including communicating, aiding in navigation, commemorating significant events or locations, and marking burial sites. For thousands of years, they were used to mark critical points in otherwise unmarked and often treacherous terrain. Although the word "cairn" comes from the Scottish Gaelic word carn—the Scots were industrious builders of cairns to mark the often-forbidding Highlands—anthropologists and architectural historians have found evidence of the structures on all seven continents, including Antarctica (dating from the early days of Antarctic land exploration, in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries). These cairns have become an element of cultural studies and have been used by historians to learn valuable information about ancient peoples and their networks of exploration and trade.

Since around the mid-twentieth century, when outdoor recreational activities, such as hiking, saw a significant increase in popularity, thousands of new cairns have been built largely for amusement and personal expression, particularly in the national parks of the American West. These new cairns, the construction of which is illegal in all US national parks, have become a critical problem for environmentalists and conservationists, who have expressed concerns over the impact of such unchecked freelance constructions. Dismissed as litter and "rock graffiti," these cairns have become the subject of increased surveillance by rangers and the object of campaigns among committed amateur conservationists who dismantle them as soon as they are discovered.

Background

The use of cairns dates back thousands of years. For migratory cultures whose people relied on the land and their ability to negotiate it, cairns became a reliable way of marking accessible trails and indicating potential hazards. These piles of stacked rocks did not fit into the natural landscape; they were designed to stick out so that travelers, hunters, migratory Indigenous Nations, and explorers would see them and be alerted to concerns over the approaching terrain. Anthropologists have found a number of such cairns still standing centuries after they were erected in sites across the globe, notably in the Andes plateaus of South America, the Pacific Islands, northern Europe, Mongolia, and the northern regions and the Mississippi River Basin of North America. In addition, large towering stacks of rocks along beaches were used as navigational instruments, like lighthouses, to alert seabound sailors to hazardous stretches along the coast, most notably among Vikings navigating the intricate fjord systems of the Scandinavian north. Given the sturdy construction of the cairns, which never used any form of adhesive but rather relied on carefully selected stones to create a balance that would hold the piles together through gravity, these information markers could withstand even extreme weather events and would maintain their integrity for long periods of time.

Over time, as trails were settled and reliable maps were established, cairns developed other functions. They have been used to memorialize people lost in the wilderness; to mark sacred areas where choreographed rituals that celebrated the seasons or highlighted some aspect of nature were conducted; to identify sites where events critical to the community took place, much like contemporary carved monuments; to mark burial sites of distinguished members of Indigenous Nations; and, as settlements grew and communities developed, to delineate boundaries of private and public property. As nations established borders in what was still essentially unsettled and open territory, cairns were used as message boxes, like mailboxes; explorers, traders, and settlers would leave messages in the stone wall, anticipating later travelers who could pass on the information. They were always practical, always useful, and always communicating some information.

Cairns Today

Cairns underwent a significant change in popular culture in the late twentieth century. In 1987, the nascent international New Age movement, which viewed the natural world as a source of spiritual energy with which the increasingly technologically dependent contemporary world needed to reengage, came together in celebration of a planetary event it termed the Harmonic Convergence. On August 24, 1987, the sun, the moon, and six planets aligned in an unusual configuration called a grand trine; several days before the event, on August 16 and 17, New Age communities around the world gathered in a globally synchronized meditation event.

That event began a large-scale return to nature in search of this spiritual energy, and campers and hikers in the United States’ extensive network of national parks and forests began to build their own cairns as a way to tap into it. Other campers and hikers who came after them built cairns as a form of art or self-expression, or simply as evidence that they had been there. Whatever the motivation, these new, amateur-built cairns were illegal. Environmentalists pointed out the obvious: hundreds of such constructions took away the unspoiled beauty of the natural environment, and, more critically, moving such large stones into these artificial formations displaced the insects, reptiles, and other small animal species that made their homes in the rocks. The US National Park Service sees these artificial cairns as little more than litter, violating their basic mandate of protecting natural areas from unnecessary interference. Some cairns, such as those in Acadia National Park in Maine, offer visitors a historical view of these structures and help guide hikers on trails. However, not all national parks have official cairns marking trails, which can cause confusion.

Bibliography

Bradley, Richard. Rock Art and the Prehistory of Atlantic Europe: Signing the Land. Routledge, 1997.

"Caring for Cairns at Acadia National Park." American Trails, www.americantrails.org/resources/caring-for-cairns-at-acadia-national-park. Accessed 25 Nov. 2024.

Fessenden, Marissa. "Conservationists Want You to Stop Building Rock Piles." Smithsonian Magazine, www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/stacking-rocks-wilderness-no-good-180955880. Accessed 25 Nov. 2024.

Gage, Mary, and James Gage. A Guide to New England Stone Structures: Stone Cairns, Stone Walls, Standing Stones, Chambers, Foundations, Wells, Culverts, Quarries and Other Structures. 2nd ed., Powwow River, 2016.

Mark, Joshua J. "Newgrange." Ancient History Encyclopedia, www.worldhistory.org/timeline/Newgrange. Accessed 25 Nov. 2024.

"Rock Cairns." National Park Service, 27 Nov. 2023, www.nps.gov/articles/rockcairns.htm. Accessed 25 Nov. 2024.

Sieg, Stina. "Making Mountains out of Trail Markers? Cairns Spark Debate in Southwest." NPR, www.npr.org/2015/08/05/429597208/making-mountains-out-of-trail-markers-cairns-spark-debate-in-southwest. Accessed 25 Nov. 2024.

Williams, David B. Cairns: Messengers in Stone. Mountaineer, 2012.