Megalithic tomb - wedge tomb, Ballyhearny, Co. Kerry
Co. Kerry |
Megalithic Tombs
Around 2005, a prehistoric monument that had stood on the southern slope of Coombe Hill on Valentia Island for several thousand years was moved.
Not toppled by weather or buried by time, but physically relocated, its component stones deposited against a field boundary roughly two hundred metres to the east of where they had originally stood. The site is a wedge tomb, a type of megalithic burial monument common in Ireland from roughly 2500 to 2000 BC, typically characterised by a long, narrow roofed gallery that narrows and lowers towards one end. What remains at Ballyhearny is three stones: one upright and two lying flat.
Before the move, the tomb occupied a small level terrace on the hillside, with an open view southward across Portmagee Channel. The single surviving upright stands just over a metre high, oriented roughly northeast to southwest, its upper edge sloping downward from west to east in a way that suggests it originally formed a side-stone of the gallery. The first of the two prostrate slabs, measuring approximately two metres by 1.82 metres, bears at least nine solution pits on its upper surface, shallow circular depressions formed by the chemical weathering of the stone, and is thought to have served as the tomb's roof-stone. The second flat slab, slightly longer and narrower, likely formed another side-stone of the gallery. Together they represent only a fragment of what would have been a more complete structure, and even that fragment is no longer in its original position.
The stones now lie against a field boundary to the east of the original site, on rough mountain pasture ground. The exact circumstances of the removal are unclear, known only through local information rather than any documented record. It is a quiet kind of loss, the sort that leaves the landscape looking almost unchanged while something fundamental about it has shifted.