Megalithic tomb - wedge tomb, Ballynahown, Co. Clare
Co. Clare |
Megalithic Tombs
On a broad rocky terrace in upland County Clare, with Galway Bay and the Aran Islands visible to the west, a Neolithic wedge tomb sits within a field system that has been worked and reworked across multiple periods of human occupation.
The tomb itself is well preserved, its chamber aligned roughly south-south-west and tapering in the characteristic way that gives wedge tombs their name: wider and taller at the front, narrower and lower toward the back. That deliberate shaping, achieved here through two single slabs fitted into natural fissures in the bedrock, their upper edges dressed smooth, speaks to a level of craft that is easy to overlook when the whole thing sits so quietly in upland pasture.
The tomb belongs to what Ruaidhrí de Valera and Seán Ó Nualláin, in their 1961 Survey of the Megalithic Tombs of Ireland, called the Ballynahown group, a cluster of four wedge tombs within a relatively compact area of this part of Clare. The other three lie between roughly 330 metres and 490 metres away, suggesting a community that either built these monuments over generations or consciously placed them in relation to one another. The chamber here measures approximately 2.5 metres in length, with a backstone that has been carefully dressed, particularly at one corner. A large roof-slab, around 2 metres long and nearly as wide, still rests on top of the structure, though it is broken at two of its edges and has likely shifted from its original position. By the time of a field inspection in 1998, natural bedrock was exposed on the chamber floor, stones had been built up inside and extended beyond the northern end, and no trace of the original covering mound remained. Someone, at some point, also added a section of modern drystone walling across the southern entrance, a quiet collision of the prehistoric and the pastoral that is common enough on the Irish uplands but still slightly arresting when you encounter it.