Megalithic tomb - wedge tomb, Killeen, Co. Mayo

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Megalithic Tombs

Megalithic tomb – wedge tomb, Killeen, Co. Mayo

In the rough stony pasture of Killeen in County Mayo, there may, or may not, be a megalithic tomb.

That uncertainty is not a gap in the record so much as the record itself. A wedge tomb, for those unfamiliar with the form, is a type of prehistoric megalithic structure common across Ireland, typically a roofed stone gallery that tapers in height and width from front to back, generally dating to the late Neolithic or early Bronze Age. What makes this particular entry unusual is that the tomb in question has never been confirmed to exist at all.

The site was added to the Sites and Monuments Record in 1991, and subsequently included in the Record of Monuments and Places in 1997, both times on the basis of information passed on by a local source. When inspectors visited in 1997, they found no visible trace of any structure at ground level. The surrounding landscape offers a plausible enough context: rough pasture scattered with field clearance cairns, the kind of terrain where generations of farmers have been shifting and stacking inconvenient stones for centuries, which makes it genuinely difficult to distinguish deliberate prehistoric construction from accumulated agricultural tidying. A wedge tomb, if one were here, could feasibly have been dismantled, absorbed into a field wall, or simply buried beneath accumulated vegetation and soil.

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