Megalithic tomb - wedge tomb, Gortnakilla, Co. Kerry

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Megalithic Tombs

Megalithic tomb – wedge tomb, Gortnakilla, Co. Kerry

On the southern slope of a ridge in Gortnakilla, Co. Kerry, a broken capstone lies partly on the ground, its five or more fragments the most immediately visible sign that something ancient is present here.

The structure is a wedge tomb, a type of megalithic monument built during the late Neolithic and into the Bronze Age, so called because the burial gallery is wider and taller at the western entrance end and tapers toward the east. This one sits in rough pasture at the edge of cutaway bog, the kind of landscape where centuries of peat extraction have peeled back the ground to reveal older surfaces beneath.

The gallery itself is modest: roughly 2.65 metres long, 1.2 metres wide at its western end, narrowing to 0.75 metres at the east. Three sidestones define its northern and southern flanks. The capstone, which measures nearly two metres east to west and just over a metre north to south but only about twelve centimetres thick, has fractured into at least five pieces and now slopes downward to the south, where part of it rests on the earth. Its northern edge still sits on the southern sidestones. Around the gallery, traces of outer walling survive on both sides, and a low earthen mound encircles the whole structure, best preserved along the northern arc. Beneath and around the surrounding bog, the faint outlines of pre-bog field walls suggest that this was once an inhabited and farmed landscape, long before the peat accumulated over it. Approximately 400 metres to the west, a second wedge tomb occupies the same general terrain, a reminder that these monuments rarely appear entirely alone.

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