Megalithic tomb - wedge tomb, Barnastooka, Co. Kerry
Co. Kerry |
Megalithic Tombs
One of the smaller roofstones at this Bronze Age tomb has two neat holes drilled through it, roughly 50mm in diameter and spaced 0.7 metres apart, with what appears to be an unfinished third attempt at a perforation nearby.
Nobody recorded why. The holes are simply there, in a collapsed slab lying slightly off-centre within the ruin, unexplained and easy to miss against the rough boggy pasture of a Kerry hillside.
The tomb sits on a level terrace mid-slope on the north-western side of a valley carrying a tributary of the Roughty River, near Barnastooka in the Kilgarvan area of County Kerry. It is a wedge tomb, a type of megalithic structure built during the Bronze Age in which the chamber narrows and lowers from one end to the other, typically aligned so that the wider, taller entrance faces west or south-west. This example runs east to west and measures just over five metres in its maximum length. Three sidestones survive upstanding along the northern side of the chamber, the largest positioned to the west, and there is evidence of a double-walled construction with packing stones between the inner and outer faces, a refinement not always preserved in tombs of this type. The southern sidestones have largely collapsed inward under the weight of the two large capstones. At the western entrance, a pair of uprights lean towards each other and may represent the remains of a portico, a kind of forecourt or antechamber framing the threshold. Immediately behind them, a vertical slab set flush with the surface may be a septal stone, a dividing slab separating the entrance area from the main burial chamber. Traces of an outer cairn, the mound of stones that would once have encased the whole structure, are still visible to the north and west, and probable kerbing stones lie about 1.9 metres out from the northern sidestones. A separate burial cairn sits roughly 100 metres downslope to the east.
The site came to light through archaeological survey carried out by John Cronin and Associates ahead of wind farm development in the area by ESB Wind Development Ltd, meaning it had no formal record before 2016. Its location on rough upland terrain beside a minor river valley, previously unexamined, is a reminder of how much of the Irish prehistoric landscape remains effectively invisible until something prompts a closer look.