The Unmade Cairns

A road-mile of barrow-cairns the tribes left bare — no ancestor-poles, no names. Walking it is the moment the country tells you what it is.

The barrow road passes between them for a full mile before it opens on the mesa flats. Sixty-some cairn-mounds on both verges, ash-grey stone, no pole, no mark. An ancestor-pole is how you tell the Bonesung keep the dead — a stake with the dead-person's sign on it says 'I know whose bones these are and I have sung them into rest.' The absence here is not neglect: this stretch has been deliberately left unmarked since before living memory. The gravesingers know why. They will not say why. The silence the road makes here is thicker than wind.