At first glance, it’s a pile of rocks. Hardly noticeable.
Could have been put there by mistake.
At second glance, it might be more.
And if you’ve just spent four hours wandering in the
direction that you hope is south-south-east, it’s a tremendous comfort.
Those piles of rocks are called cairns, and though they are
still used today (I can attest to this from my own backpacking experience),
they have been used for centuries all over Europe, North Africa, Asia, and the
Americas. I specifically want to talk about the use of cairns in Europe.
Our word cairn
comes from the word carn, which is
found in Scottish Gaelic and other Celtic languages, including Irish and
Cornish.
This is Cornwall, a beautiful county way down on the
peninsular thumb of England. Some linguists suggest that Cornwall itself was
named for the cairns that dot its coastline.
Cairns, which vary greatly in size and shape, have primarily
been used to mark something, but that
something varies greatly from place to place and case to case. Sometimes it’s
the peak of a mountain (like the highest point in Cornwall, Brown Willy SummitCairn), sometimes it’s a grave, sometimes it’s a trail.
There are a number of traditions
surrounding cairns as well, and these vary from region to region. An old
Scottish blessing says “Cuiridh mi clach air du charn,” or “I’ll put a stone on
your cairn,” because of a tradition of carrying a stone up from the bottom of a
hill to place it on a cairn at the top. In a Portuguese legend, the stones of a
cairn (called a moledro) are
enchanted soldiers that, if removed from the pile and placed underneath a
pillow at night, will come to life for a moment and then magically return to
their places.
The use of cairns makes practical
sense to me. You use what you have to mark a place you want to remember—because
that place is important to you, and you want to find your way back, or because
you want to communicated with those who might follow you, and tell them that
they are going in the right way. It makes sense that you take something
provided by nature and rearrange it in a way that makes it obvious that humans
have been there. I like that idea, and that sense of connection and involvement
with nature. I also like knowing that whenever I am hiking and set my course to
a cairn I see, I am not only engaging with nature, but with a specific vein of
folk knowledge as well.
I like the idea of people helping others who come after them. It reminded me of the talk Sister Sharon Samuelson gave at the first BYU devotional about bridges and how we should build or repair life's bridges that we cross in order to help those after us. She quoted Gordon B. Hinckley in saying "life is a great chain of generations," and we need to be a connecting link.
ReplyDeleteI had no idea that there were such things as cairns, or anything like them, especially still today.... They seem like the original form of geotagging/social network (think check in from Facebook). It seems that it is not just us in our day and time that we like to document where we are or have been for others to see. With cairns though it is anonymous and definitely more connected to nature rather than just on a computer screen. I would like to know how frequent the cairns are because I would like to see one!
ReplyDeleteWill people make cairns all the time. I happen to have made a cairn type symbol in the street while camping this weekend so my brother in law would know where we were parked at. My dad also leaves cairns sometimes while hiking for some reason or another. Its also helpful while spelunking so you dont die lost in a cave.
ReplyDeleteI really like this idea, Misa, of helping those to come. One my favorite quotes is by Sir Isaac Newton who said "If I have seen further it is only by standing on the shoulders of giants." I love it because it shows his humility and it really is true. Knowledge has been cumulative over time. Just because i use a computer now, doesnt mean that I would have been able to invent it and use it if it hadnt been invented yet. We are all able to increase and better our knowledge because of those people that came before us and got us to that point. We all stand on the shoulders of giants.
I think this is a really cool subject as well. Cairns are universal symbols, I feel like, that do mark the things we consider important. We use rocks that don't wear or degrade as fast as other things to form these lasting memorials of trails, graves,and mountaintops. As humans, we want to make our mark on the world and rearrange it to reflect our own opinions and values. We do this by giving order to something that didn't have it before, like making rock cairns, or giving meaning to a symbol that didn't stand for that before. Its the same sort of thing that we do when we invent words that are symbols of things. It all comes back to our need to create, from the divine spark that is within us all.
ReplyDeleteI think it is interesting that the same symbol was used in many different ways depending of the culture of the particular area. We still use it to mark trails, and this brings us comfort knowing someone has gone before. The Jewish population still uses it to mark graves and to show respect at grave, like how we bring flowers. I think it could be a kind of mendala (the archetype of images). Something about it bears significance across many cultures, the specific meaning is determined by the culture.
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