Megalithic tomb - portal tomb, Whitestown, Co. Waterford

Co. Waterford |

Megalithic Tombs

Megalithic tomb – portal tomb, Whitestown, Co. Waterford

A large flat stone, roughly four metres across, sits low in a Waterford pasture with nothing obviously supporting it, at least not at first glance. Beneath it, the remains of a collapsed chamber are just visible, a few upright stones still holding their positions after several thousand years. The whole structure has gradually become incorporated into a field boundary, the northeast side of a NW-SE running bank absorbing what was once a freestanding megalithic portal tomb. Portal tombs, sometimes called dolmens, are among the oldest monument types in Ireland, Neolithic funerary structures typically consisting of two tall upright portal stones, a sill stone at the entrance, and a large capstone tilted dramatically overhead. This one is considerably more modest in its current state, though the scale of the roofstone, measuring 4 metres by 3.3 metres and up to a metre thick, gives some indication of the effort involved in its original construction.

The tomb sits towards the bottom of a southeast-facing valley slope, with a stream running roughly southwest to northeast about eighty metres to the southeast. It is built from Old Red Sandstone conglomerate, a coarse-grained rock characteristic of the Waterford landscape, formed from ancient compressed riverbed sediment. The chamber itself was probably originally oriented to face southwest, a common alignment in Irish portal tombs, though the collapse and subsequent absorption into the field bank have obscured much of that original arrangement. The site was noted by Power in 1911 and later catalogued by Ó Nualláin in 1983, by which point the condition appears to have been much as it is today, the roofstone settled, the chamber gone beneath it, the whole quietly folded into the working geometry of the surrounding farmland.

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