Cromlech, Foilycleary, Co. Tipperary
Co. Tipperary |
Megalithic Tombs
Three stones on a waterlogged hillside in upland Tipperary are all that visibly remain of what was once, by careful measurement, a substantial megalithic structure.
Two of the stones now lie flat on the ground; a single orthostat, a large upright slab, still stands to the south-west of them. The site sits on a poorly drained, south-facing slope of Knockastanna Hill, looking out over the Gortnageragh river valley, and the ground conditions alone give some sense of what centuries of neglect and collapse look like in practice.
The disagreement over what exactly this monument once was has a long paper trail. In 1910, H. S. Crawford described it as a destroyed dolmen, noting three stones arranged in a line, two side by side and a third some 2.4 metres distant. Later, the megalithic tomb researchers Ruaidhrí de Valera and Seán Ó Nualláin reassessed it as a possible wedge tomb, a type of prehistoric megalithic monument typically broader at one end and narrowing toward the other, generally orientated east to west. Their classification drew on earlier Ordnance Survey field letters, which recorded a considerably more intact structure: a tomb some three metres in length, with four stones still standing at that time and a large capstone inclining toward the east, measuring roughly 1.57 metres by 1.36 metres. The south stone alone stood 1.2 metres high at its western end. What the OS correspondents measured with such precision has since lost most of its height and arrangement, leaving the current scatter of three stones, only one of them upright, as the monument's remainder.