The example at Leana in County Clare is, by any reckoning, in a sorry state, yet what remains on that gentle north-west-facing slope in semi-karst rough pastureland is more legible than it first appears, and the landscape around it is extraordinarily dense with prehistoric activity.

When archaeologists Ruaidhrí de Valera and Seán Ó Nualláin surveyed it for their 1961 Survey of the Megalithic Tombs of Ireland, they found a structure oriented south-west to north-east, embedded in a mound of which only faint semicircular traces survived on the western side. The southern sidestone, nearly three metres long and over a metre high at its wider end, was still standing in its original position, though leaning heavily northward; its inner face retained a dressed, straight top edge, a detail that speaks to the care originally taken in its construction. Flat on the ground to the north lay two large slabs, one atop the other. De Valera and Ó Nualláin agreed with the earlier observer T. J. Westropp, writing in 1905, that the upper of these fallen slabs was the capstone, while the lower was the collapsed northern sidestone, its original top edge identifiable along one side. The arrangement suggested the tomb had been wider at its western end, consistent with the wedge form. A small stone set flush with the ground surface near the western end of the southern sidestone may have been a packing-stone or part of an outer wall. A revisit in 1998 found the site unchanged, though that small stone went unrecorded on that occasion.

What makes the Leana site particularly worth thinking about is not the tomb itself in isolation but its immediate surroundings. Within roughly 160 metres there are at least three further wedge tombs, an additional megalithic structure, and a cairn. This is not a solitary monument in an empty landscape but part of a concentrated prehistoric complex, set within what appears to be an extensive ancient field system. The karst terrain of this part of Clare, with its thin soils and exposed limestone, has helped preserve surface traces that might elsewhere have been ploughed away or built over, giving a rare sense of the density with which these communities once marked and organised their ground.