Megalithic tomb, Carricknahorna, Co. Sligo

Co. Sligo |

Megalithic Tombs

Megalithic tomb, Carricknahorna, Co. Sligo

On a flat stretch of ground below the southern end of the Bricklieve Mountains, a single standing stone rises from the centre of an oval earthen mound, with a broad view opening out to the southeast across Lough Key.

The stone, an orthostat, is just 0.75 metres tall and roughly aligned southwest to northeast. Around it, the evidence of a once more substantial megalithic tomb is quietly scattered: a fallen slab to the south, a second larger prostrate stone beyond that, and some three metres to the west-southwest, three small stones no higher than 0.3 metres arrange themselves into a slightly curved line two metres long. The overall mound measures 22.5 metres along its northeast-southwest axis and reaches a maximum height of just 1.5 metres, its profile so low and gradual that it could easily be mistaken for a natural undulation in the field.

Megalithic tombs of this kind, built during the Neolithic period roughly five to six thousand years ago, were communal monuments, places where the dead were interred and where the wider landscape seems to have been a deliberate part of the design. The precise tomb type here is not easily identified from what survives above ground, but the oval mound, the central orthostat, and the scattered fallen slabs are consistent with the kinds of court or portal tombs documented across County Sligo by Seán Ó Nualláin in his Survey of the Megalithic Tombs of Ireland, where this site is recorded as number 122 in the Sligo volume, published in 1989. The Bricklieve Mountains nearby are already associated with the dense concentration of passage tombs at Carrowkeel, which makes this more isolated and fragmentary example all the more quietly suggestive of how thoroughly this part of Sligo was shaped by Neolithic communities. A modern fence now cuts across the mound near its eastern edge, and there are two small pits visible in the mound surface, one at the southeast and one at the southwest, likely the result of disturbance at some point in the intervening millennia.

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