Megalithic tomb - wedge tomb, Cloonyconry More, Co. Clare
Co. Clare |
Megalithic Tombs
County Clare has a remarkable concentration of wedge tombs, the most numerous of Ireland's megalithic tomb types, and the townland of Cloonyconry More holds one such monument, quietly marking a landscape that has been in continuous human use for thousands of years.
Wedge tombs, so called because their roofed stone galleries taper in both height and width from front to back, belong broadly to the late Neolithic and early Bronze Age periods, and Clare has more of them than almost anywhere else in the country.
The principal scholarly record for this site draws on the work of Ruaidhrí de Valera and Seán Ó Nualláin, whose Survey of the Megalithic Tombs of Ireland, Volume I, covering County Clare, was published by the Stationery Office in Dublin in 1961. That volume represented a systematic effort to document the county's megalithic inheritance at a time when many such monuments were still incompletely catalogued, and it remains a foundational reference for the region's prehistoric archaeology. Beyond what that survey captured, the specific dimensions, condition, and orientation of the Cloonyconry More tomb are not elaborated in the available material, which is itself a small reminder of how many of these structures persist in the landscape with only the barest administrative outline attached to them.