Megalithic tomb - wedge tomb, Clooneen, Co. Clare

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Megalithic Tombs

Megalithic tomb – wedge tomb, Clooneen, Co. Clare

Three prehistoric tombs within roughly thirty metres of one another is unusual enough to make a person stop and wonder what, exactly, drew Neolithic communities back to this particular slope in County Clare.

The most closely studied of the three sits on a south-east-facing hillside, half-buried in pasture and hazel scrub, its limestone uprights still holding their positions inside a low, grass-covered oval mound roughly five metres long and a metre high. What makes its story slightly stranger is that for decades it was not formally recognised as a wedge tomb at all.

Wedge tombs are the most numerous of Ireland's megalithic tomb types, a broad category of prehistoric stone-built burial chambers, tapering in width and height from a wider, taller entrance end toward a narrower back. This example at Clooneen is small, measuring just 3.4 metres in length and no more than 0.9 metres wide at the western end, with a maximum surviving height of 0.8 metres. Two parallel rows of limestone slabs, set upright on their long edges, form the chamber walls, and a transverse slab divides the interior roughly 0.8 metres from the eastern end. When Ruaidhrí de Valera and Seán Ó Nualláin examined it for their 1961 Survey of the Megalithic Tombs of Ireland, they interpreted the monument as a divided or double cist, a small stone-lined grave rather than a true megalithic chamber, though they noted it was probably influenced by the wedge-tomb tradition. That reading carried through into the 1996 Record of Monuments and Places, where it was officially listed as a cist. Subsequent re-examination revised the classification, recognising the structure as the wedge tomb the arrangement of its stones actually describes. A field bank running roughly north-north-west to south-south-east may have clipped the eastern end of the chamber at some point, which could explain why the full extent of the tomb is difficult to read on the ground. The multiperiod field system surrounding the site suggests the landscape here has been divided, bounded, and worked across many centuries, with the tomb sitting quietly at the centre of all that accumulated activity. The two neighbouring wedge tombs, one about thirteen metres to the south-west and another around fifteen metres to the north, have not been explained by the available evidence, but their proximity suggests the area held some concentrated significance in prehistory that a single burial monument alone does not account for.

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