Megalithic tomb - wedge tomb, Tullycommon, Co. Clare
Co. Clare |
Megalithic Tombs
On a gentle west-facing slope in Tullycommon, Co. Clare, a megalithic tomb sits quietly along the line of a field wall, its entrance oriented towards the setting sun as its builders intended several thousand years ago.
What makes this particular monument worth pausing over is how well its internal geometry survives. The chamber tapers deliberately from a width of 1.15 metres at the opening down to 0.7 metres at the back, and the roof descends slightly too, from 0.8 metres at the front to 0.7 metres at the rear. This characteristic wedge shape, narrowing and lowering from west to east, is precisely what gives this class of Neolithic and early Bronze Age tomb its name.
The structure is composed of two sidestones, a backstone, and two roofstones. The northern sidestone is the larger of the pair, measuring 2.6 metres in length and reaching a maximum height of 0.9 metres; the southern runs to 2.25 metres. Behind the backstone, two smaller stones extend eastward, one from the southern end and one from the northern, a detail that may point to the presence of a second chamber, though this remains uncertain. Around the entrance, the remnants of the original covering mound are still legible as a D-shaped cairn, roughly 7 metres north to south and 3 metres east to west, its surviving height ranging from 0.3 metres at the north to 0.8 metres along the western and southern edges. A cairn of this form, a low rubble mound originally heaped over the stone structure to seal and define it, would once have made the tomb a far more imposing feature in the landscape. The townland boundary runs just 53 metres to the south, suggesting the monument may have played some role in how this ground was understood and divided over a very long span of time. The tomb is a protected national monument in state care, listed as no. 270.