Dermot & Grania's Bed, Moymore, Co. Clare
Co. Clare |
Megalithic Tombs
In a pasture in Moymore, County Clare, four moss-covered limestone slabs lie scattered in the grass, no longer forming any coherent structure, yet still carrying one of the most romantically charged names in Irish mythology.
The place is called Dermot and Grania's Bed, a label attached to dozens of megalithic sites across Ireland, each supposedly marking a spot where the legendary lovers Diarmuid and Gráinne rested during their long flight from the pursuing Fionn Mac Cumhaill. The name is folklore's way of accounting for ancient stonework that had lost its original explanation, a kind of mythological placeholder applied wherever a dolmen or cist caught the local imagination.
What once stood here was a cist, a small stone-lined burial box of the type used in prehistoric Ireland to inter the dead, typically consisting of upright slabs with a capstone laid across the top. The antiquarian Thomas Johnson Westropp, writing between 1902 and 1904, recorded it as a small cist of four stones with a cover, but noted that the covering stone had already been removed sometime after 1839, the year before it was first mapped by the Ordnance Survey. The 1840 OS six-inch map shows a neat rectangular feature, roughly 7.2 metres by 5.3 metres, still bearing its folkloric name. Later editions quietly amended this to "Dermot and Grania's Bed (site of)", that parenthetical acknowledgement of loss carrying a certain melancholy precision. What remains today is a group of four orthostats, upright or once-upright stones, spread across an area of about four by six metres, their original arrangement long undone. The largest, a table-top stone roughly two metres long, lies to the east, partially swallowed by briars. The fourth stone, to the north, is entirely obscured by ivy and hemmed in by thorn trees, its dimensions almost impossible to assess from the surface. All four are pocked limestone, the same material that breaks through as outcrop nearby to the south-east, west, and north-west, suggesting the builders did not need to carry their raw material far.