Megalithic tomb - wedge tomb, Ardnagreevagh, Co. Galway
Co. Galway |
Megalithic Tombs
At Ardnagreevagh in County Galway, a prehistoric tomb sits quietly folded into the landscape, its ancient structure absorbed into what may once have been the earthen bank of a circular enclosure.
That relationship, a burial monument apparently built along the line of an earlier or contemporary boundary, gives the site an unusual layered quality, as though two different impulses towards marking space in the landscape have become inseparable over the millennia.
The tomb is a wedge tomb, a type of megalithic burial monument found across Ireland and dating broadly to the late Neolithic and early Bronze Age, typically constructed somewhere between 2500 and 2000 BC. Wedge tombs take their name from their characteristic profile: the chamber is higher and wider at the western end and tapers downward towards the east, and this example follows that pattern closely. The chamber here is narrow, just under a metre wide and more than two metres in length, formed by two sidestones and roofed with a single capstone. The sidestones slope from west to east in the defining wedge shape, and a partially buried stone at the eastern end may represent a backstone, the closing slab that would have sealed the tomb's narrower end. The whole structure is oriented east to west, an alignment common to wedge tombs across Ireland, and one that may have held significance related to the movement of the sun. The monument was documented by Ruaidhrí de Valera and Seán Ó Nualláin in their Survey of the Megalithic Tombs of Ireland, published in 1972, which remains a foundational record for this class of monument.
