cairns in the wild

i've been meaning to blog about this for some time - a friend of mine recently contributed photographs of cairns for an exhibit at the local library, which i got to see - lovely photos of rocks stacked and piled in all sorts of places...

here's what wikipedia.org has to say about CAIRNS:

little cairns & stream/photo by tjgoogins 2010/all rights reserved

A cairn (carn in Irish, carnedd in Welsh, càrn in Scots Gaelic) is a human-made pile of stones, often in conical form. They are usually found in uplands, on moorland, on mountaintops, or near waterways.
In modern times cairns are often erected as landmarks. In ancient times they were erected as sepulchral monuments, or used for practical and astronomical uses.

They are built for several purposes:

* They may mark a burial site, and may memorialize the dead.
* They may mark the summit of a mountain.
* Placed at regular intervals, they indicate a path across stony or barren terrain or across glaciers.
* The Inuit erect human-shaped cairns, or inunnguaq as milestones or directional markers in the Canadian Arctic.
* In North America, cairns may mark buffalo jumps or "drive lanes."[citation needed]
* In North America, cairns may be used for astronomy.[citation needed]
* In Norse Greenland, cairns were used as a hunting implement to direct reindeer towards cliffs[1]
* In the Canadian Maritimes cairns were used as lighthouse-like holders for fires that guided boats, as in the novel The Shipping News.
* In North America, cairns are often petroforms in the shapes of turtles or other animals.[citation needed]
* In the United Kingdom, they are often large Bronze Age structures which frequently contain burial cists
* In parks exhibiting fantastic rock formations, such as the Grand Canyon, tourists often construct simple cairns in reverence of the larger counterparts.[citation needed]
* They may have a strong aesthetic purpose, for example in the art of Andy Goldsworthy.
* They may be used to commemorate events: anything from a battle site, to the place where a cart tipped over.
* Some are merely places where farmers have collected stones removed from a field.

They vary from loose, small piles of stones to elaborate feats of engineering. In some places, games are regularly held to find out who can build the most beautiful cairn.[citation needed] Cairns along hiking trails are often maintained by groups of hikers adding a stone when they pass.

as for these, my friend and i saw them in the woods when we went for a walk one day this summer (or was it back in the spring?) anyway, cairns are cool - which reminds me, i want to create a walkable labyrinth in my back yard - more on that next time!

until my next blog... "love the life you live - live the life you love"