Megalithic tomb - wedge tomb, Kilcatherine, Co. Cork

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Megalithic Tombs

Megalithic tomb – wedge tomb, Kilcatherine, Co. Cork

About 150 metres from the rocky shoreline at the mouth of the Kenmare River, in a patch of partly cut-away bog near Kilcatherine Point, a small megalithic tomb sits half-dissolved into the landscape.

It is easy to miss, low and ruinous, incorporated into a shallow mound that barely announces itself. What remains of the chamber measures at least 1.5 metres in length and roughly a metre wide at its western end, with one sidestone still standing upright to the north, another fallen to the south, and a closing stone, sometimes called a septal stone, still in place at the western end. A displaced roofstone lies above the chamber, no longer spanning it properly but present nonetheless, like a lid that has slipped.

This is a wedge tomb, a type of megalithic burial monument built during the later Neolithic and into the early Bronze Age, generally dated to somewhere between 4,000 and 3,500 years ago. Wedge tombs are the most numerous megalithic tomb type in Ireland, and they tend to be wider and higher at one end, tapering as they extend, which gives them their name. The east-west alignment of this example is consistent with the form. An unusual structural detail here is the doubling of the northern wall: three outer-wall stones run parallel to the inner sidestone, creating a second skin along that side of the chamber. This feature, recorded by Ruaidhrí de Valera and Seán Ó Nualláin in their survey of megalithic tombs published in 1982, suggests the monument was more carefully constructed than its current ruined state implies. The bog that surrounds it has been cut away in places, which means the tomb's relationship to its original ground surface has been altered over time by turf-cutting.

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