Megalithic structure, Noughaval, Co. Clare
Co. Clare |
Megalithic Tombs
On a limestone plateau above Noughaval in County Clare, a scatter of moss-covered stones occupies a shelf of pasture that has been worked and reordered by human hands across many centuries.
The stones are not dramatic. They lie mostly flat, oriented loosely north to south or east to west, and a few are wedged upright into grykes, the natural fissures that split the Burren's limestone pavement. What makes this place quietly interesting is less what it is than what it can no longer be said to be.
The antiquarian Thomas Johnson Westropp visited in 1897 and recorded an overthrown cromlech, a portal tomb or similar megalithic structure, measuring seven feet by twelve feet. When he returned, sometime before 1915, he found that even that ruined arrangement had been further disturbed: the blocks, he noted, had been uprooted and overthrown since his earlier visit. The site had already been marked on the Ordnance Survey's 25-inch plan of 1897 and appeared again on the 6-inch edition of 1920, labelled as a cromlech on both. But when Ruaidhri de Valera and Seán Ó Nualláin examined it as part of the Megalithic Survey of Ireland in 1961, they concluded there was insufficient evidence to accept it as a megalithic tomb of any recognised type. It sits now in a kind of classificatory limbo, noted but unconfirmed, disturbed beyond the point where confident interpretation is possible. Nearby, within roughly sixty metres, lie the remains of Cahercutteen cashel, a stone-walled ringfort, and an unclassified cairn, a mound of stones whose original purpose is similarly uncertain. The whole plateau amounts to a layered field system spanning multiple periods, each phase of use having shuffled or obscured what came before.