Megalithic structure, Grange (Smallcounty By.), Co. Limerick
Co. Limerick |
Megalithic Tombs
On a flat stretch of pasture beside Lough Gur in County Limerick, there is a site recorded in the national monuments database not for what survives, but for what does not.
Annotated on one edition of the Ordnance Survey map as 'Giant's Grave (Site of)', this small parcel of ground represents something that was already lost by the time anyone thought to write it down properly. No stones remain. No outline is visible from the ground. What exists instead is a trail of references, an old man's recollection, and the faint impression of something that once shaped like a grave.
The most comprehensive account comes from Lynch, writing in 1895, who noted that a very old man at Lough Gur had told him he personally removed stones from the structure, and that it had been shaped like a grave. Lynch described it as 'some kind of a stone structure', which is about as uncertain as formal archaeological language gets. The site had also been mentioned by Harkness in 1869 and O'Kelly in 1944, though neither added much to the picture. Tellingly, the feature appears on neither the 1840 nor the 1897 Ordnance Survey Ireland editions, suggesting it had already been substantially disturbed or dismantled by then. It was recorded in the Megalithic Survey of Ireland by De Valera and Ó Nualláin in 1982, who concluded that its nature remains uncertain. A megalithic structure, in this context, refers broadly to a monument built using large stones, a category that includes passage tombs, court tombs, portal tombs, and related forms common throughout prehistoric Ireland. Whatever this one was, it no longer offers enough evidence to say.
The site sits 5 metres west of a historic trackway called Cladh na Leac, which runs roughly north-north-west to south-south-east through this part of Limerick. It lies 60 metres from the western shore of Lough Gur, within a remarkable cluster of prehistoric monuments: the great stone circle at Grange is 250 metres to the north-west, two further stone circles are 350 metres in the same direction, two possible megalithic tombs are nearby, and the standing stone known as Cloch á Bhíle sits 200 metres to the west-north-west. The location is visible on Google Earth orthoimages from 2018 and 2020, where ground markings in the pasture can be made out. For anyone visiting the Lough Gur area, the absence here is worth pausing over: a site surrounded by some of the most significant prehistoric remains in Ireland, yet itself reduced to a note in a survey and an old man's memory of the stones he carried away.