Megalithic structure, Britway, Co. Cork
Co. Cork |
Megalithic Tombs
Just to the east of Britway church and its graveyard, in a sloping pasture field on a north-facing hillside in County Cork, a scatter of old stones sits in rough rectangular arrangement.
Some are upright, one leans southward, and one lies flat. The dimensions are modest, the tallest slab reaching less than three-quarters of a metre, and without knowing what to look for, a casual eye might pass the whole thing off as a collapsed field boundary or a chance grouping. What marks it out is a separate slab, partially embedded in the ground immediately to the north of the structure, measuring about 1.2 metres by 1 metre. Along its eastern edge are a series of hollows, and local tradition holds that these are the knee-prints of Saint Bridget herself.
The rectangular arrangement of upright and fallen stones belongs to a class of megalithic structures whose precise original function is not always easy to determine, particularly when the component stones have shifted over centuries of agricultural use and settlement. What survives here is a roughly north-to-south aligned structure, defined by an upright slab on the west side and a more complex arrangement to the north, where two overlapping slabs sit at the western end. The three stones forming the south side are in varying states, one flat, one tilted, one still standing. Stones are scattered inside the outline as well. The association with Saint Bridget, one of Ireland's most widely venerated early medieval saints, layered onto a prehistoric or early monument, is a pattern found at many sites across the country, where Christian devotion attached itself to places that already carried a sense of antiquity and significance. The knee-shaped hollows in the slab are the kind of feature sometimes described as bullaun stones, natural or worked depressions in rock that attracted votive or devotional meaning, though here the local explanation is more specific and more personal.
