Megalithic tomb - wedge tomb, Knockmael, Co. Clare

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Megalithic Tombs

Megalithic tomb – wedge tomb, Knockmael, Co. Clare

On the townland of Knockmael in County Clare, a wedge tomb survives from the Neolithic or early Bronze Age, a period when this form of communal stone burial was widespread across the west of Ireland.

Wedge tombs, so called because their gallery narrows and lowers from front to back, are the most numerous of Ireland's megalithic tomb types and are concentrated particularly in Munster and Connacht, yet individual examples can still feel like a quietly private encounter with deep prehistory when you come upon them in the landscape.

The principal scholarly record for this tomb comes from Ruaidhrí de Valera and Seán Ó Nualláin, whose Survey of the Megalithic Tombs of Ireland, Volume I, covering County Clare, was published by the Stationery Office in Dublin in 1961. That volume remains a foundational reference for the megalithic archaeology of the county, cataloguing the structural details, orientations, and conditions of tombs that might otherwise pass unrecorded. County Clare has an unusually dense concentration of these monuments, a fact that speaks to the intensity of Neolithic and Bronze Age activity across its limestone plateaux and more fertile lowland areas.

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