Megalithic tomb - wedge tomb, Parknabinnia, Co. Clare

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Megalithic Tombs

Megalithic tomb – wedge tomb, Parknabinnia, Co. Clare

The roofstone here has slipped southward and disappeared partway into its own mound.

The southern sidestone has collapsed inwards. A closing stone at the western end still stands, though it leans outward. What remains of this wedge tomb on the south-eastern edge of the central Burren plateau is fragmentary, yes, but it sits within a landscape so dense with related monuments that the fragmentation itself becomes part of the story. The townlands of Parknabinnia, Leana, Caherfadda, and Commons North together contain what researchers have identified as the densest concentration of wedge tombs in Ireland, and this monument is the most southerly of a tight local cluster of four.

The tomb was already in poor condition when antiquarians first turned their attention to it. In 1839, John O'Donovan noted three cromlechs, the old catch-all term for megalithic monuments, in the same field, one of them already prostrate. Thomas Johnson Westropp visited in 1898 and described what he took to be a small cist surrounded by seven slabs, though he later revised this, clarifying that his earlier measurements referred to the mound and its surrounding stones rather than the burial chamber itself, which is in fact formed of three slabs each a little over five feet long. Westropp grouped it within the "Reabachan Group of Dolmens" in 1907. The structure, aligned roughly west-south-west to east-north-east, sits at the centre of a mound measuring approximately ten metres east to west and nine metres north to south. The northern sidestone is notable for being dressed along its top edge, a detail of some care in a monument now so tumbled. Excavations at nearby wedge tombs in the Roughan Hill group have confirmed a Chalcolithic to Early Bronze Age date of construction, placing these monuments somewhere in the broad window between roughly 2500 and 1500 BC. That period also saw the establishment of farming enclosures within a few hundred metres of this tomb, the remains of which are still traceable in the field boundaries around it, making the whole area a rare survival of an early prehistoric farmed landscape rather than isolated funerary monuments scattered across empty ground.

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