In Assassin's Creed Valhalla, Eivor is tasked with building stone cairns all across England in one of the game's most divisive mysteries. Some players appear to love the art of stacking rocks on top of each other until the structure looks just right, while others seem to wish that Assassin's Creed Valhalla had just made cairns part of the game world instead of a collectible. This controversy within the player base hasn't stopped fans of the game from reporting sightings of cairns in real life.
Cairns are man-made stacks or piles of stones that have historically been used for a wide variety of purposes, including landmarks, the burial of the dead, indicating where item caches are hidden, and trail markers. Fans of Assassin's Creed Valhalla have created cairns in the past, but it seems they can also spot an interesting cairn in the wild.
Redditor Litrueno shared a picture of a tall, conical cairn they reportedly discovered on a lake in Switzerland. The photo shows the lake in question behind the cairn to be a shallow expanse of blue water with the jagged peaks of a mountain behind it. The result is a picturesque image of a tall but steady cairn, built using significantly flatter rocks than some stones Assassin's Creed Valhalla offers.
Another Redditor, faceblender, took a picture of an entire rocky beach dotted with cairns. This striking coastal shot was reportedly taken in Klint, Denmark, and features a variety of small, squat cairns. Although some of the structures appear to have been knocked down in the image, it still shows cairns almost as far as the eye can see. Assassin's Creed Valhalla may take place largely in England, but both the Vikings and the game have their roots in Scandinavian landscapes like this, which may make it an especially suitable location for cairns.
A third Redditor by the name of Kainsmasquerade shared another lakeside photo, this one apparently depicting a number of cairns erected at the shore of Lake Constance at the Swiss/German border.
Redditor gogoloco2 also came across a cluster of cairns by the water on the other side of the ocean--specifically, Taughannock Falls State Park in New York. This image shows more small, squat cairns alongside tall ones and even the occasional rectangular Stonehenge-like formation. These cairns could serve as examples for Assassin's Creed Valhalla players who might be unfamiliar with the basic structure of a cairn.
Assassin's Creed Valhalla is available now on PC, PS4, PS5, Stadia, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X.