Megalithic tomb, Licketstown, Co. Kilkenny

Co. Kilkenny |

Megalithic Tombs

Megalithic tomb, Licketstown, Co. Kilkenny

On a south-east facing slope above the River Suir in County Kilkenny, there once stood a stone monument that generated more questions than it answered, and which no longer exists at all.

Destroyed around the 1960s during land reclamation, it left behind two contradictory nineteenth-century descriptions and a local legend about a warrior's burial that is difficult to verify and impossible to dismiss.

The first account, published in 1849 by Moore, described a grave some twenty-five feet long and up to twelve feet wide, lined with large stone flags and flanked at either end by uprights standing roughly sixteen feet high. According to Moore, the tomb had been opened around 1790, when a gigantic skeleton was found inside, accompanied by a large rust-eaten sword and a helmet of uncommon size. Three years later, in 1852, Cody offered a far more modest picture: a cist, which is a simple stone-lined burial box, measuring only about eight feet long and three feet in each other dimension, surrounded by four upright stones arranged in what appeared to be a circular setting roughly twelve feet in diameter. The two accounts are so different in scale that it is genuinely unclear whether they describe the same feature, different parts of the same monument, or whether one observer was drawing on older, embellished local memory rather than direct observation. The sword and helmet, if real, suggest a medieval or early medieval burial rather than a prehistoric one, which complicates any straightforward classification. Archaeologists have acknowledged this uncertainty directly, and the site has never been confidently assigned to any single monument type.

There is nothing left to visit. The monument was cleared from the hillside, and the landscape has moved on. What remains is the paper trail: two observers, half a century of folklore, and a skeleton that may or may not have been a giant.

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