Carn, Sheemore, Co. Leitrim

Co. Leitrim |

Megalithic Tombs

Carn, Sheemore, Co. Leitrim

On the northern rim of Sheemore Hill's plateau in County Leitrim, a low circular mound sits with quiet purpose, its age measured in millennia rather than centuries.

At roughly twelve metres across and less than half a metre high, the cairn is modest enough that a casual walker might step over its edge without pause. What distinguishes it is the stone-lined rectangular chamber set within, measuring just over three metres in length and a little under a metre and a half wide, its opening facing to the southwest, where a passage may once have extended. A passage tomb is broadly what it sounds like: a burial monument, typically Neolithic, in which a stone-lined corridor leads to a chamber, often aligned with astronomical events. Here the passage itself has not been fully confirmed, but the chamber's orientation hints at that tradition.

Sheemore Hill carries not one but three cairns on its plateau, and this one occupies the northern edge, sitting in what aerial views suggest is the left background of the group. The site was catalogued by de Valera and Ó Nualláin in 1972 and again by Michael Herity in 1974, both of whom placed it within the wider landscape of Irish passage tomb distribution. The chamber walls and the cairn material that remains visible to the northwest and north are the principal surviving features, though the monument has clearly suffered the attrition that most exposed hilltop cairns accumulate across four or five thousand years of weather, agriculture, and casual disturbance. It holds a preservation order, which places it under the protection of the National Monuments Acts.

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