Megalithic structure, Ballintombay, Co. Wicklow

Co. Wicklow |

Megalithic Tombs

Megalithic structure, Ballintombay, Co. Wicklow

On the eastern slopes of Kirikee Mountain in County Wicklow, a megalithic structure once stood that has since been reduced to a name on a map and a bracket.

The current Ordnance Survey marks the location as "Giant's Grave (Site of)", that parenthetical qualification doing considerable work: there is nothing left to see.

The 1838 OS six-inch map recorded it simply as "Giant's Grave", the name that communities across Ireland commonly applied to megalithic tombs, those large prehistoric stone monuments, usually dating from the Neolithic or early Bronze Age, whose scale seemed to demand a mythological explanation. By the time William Copeland Borlase included a reference to the site in his 1897 survey of Irish megalithic monuments, the structure was presumably still identifiable in some form. At some point after that, the eastern slopes of Kirikee Mountain were planted with commercial forestry, and whatever remained was absorbed and, eventually, lost. The forest that now covers the site is both the reason the remains disappeared and the reason casual visitors are unlikely to find anything even if they go looking.

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