Megalithic tomb - wedge tomb, Cromwell, Co. Limerick
Co. Limerick |
Megalithic Tombs
On a flat-topped ridge on the southern slope of Cromwell Hill in County Limerick, a wedge tomb sits in open pasture with a view that stretches from the Galty Mountains on the south-eastern horizon to the wide lowlands of northern Limerick.
What makes it quietly arresting is not its size but its ambiguity. A large orthostat stands isolated at the eastern end of the structure, and archaeologists remain uncertain whether it marks the far end of the burial gallery or belongs instead to an outer retaining wall. Several stones around it are displaced, one roofstone leans at an angle against a sidestone rather than lying flat, and at least one slab near the western end may once have been a septal stone, a thin upright used to divide the interior of the gallery into sections. The tomb is, by the measured assessment of the Megalithic Survey of Ireland, fairly well preserved, but it is the kind of preservation that raises as many questions as it answers.
Wedge tombs are the most numerous megalithic tomb type in Ireland, built broadly during the late Neolithic and into the early Bronze Age, and they take their name from the characteristic tapering of the gallery from west to east. This example, recorded in detail by Ruaidhrí de Valera and Seán Ó Nualláin in their Survey of the Megalithic Tombs of Ireland, Volume IV, published by the Stationery Office in Dublin in 1982, has a gallery that narrows from 1.6 metres wide at the west to 1.45 metres at the east. Its full length is uncertain: the gallery proper measures at least 5.2 metres, but if the isolated eastern orthostat is included, the structure may originally have extended to around 6.65 metres. Two roofstones survive, one lying level across all five gallery uprights and measuring 1.5 metres by 1.7 metres, the other tilted and resting against a sidestone at the western end. Traces of the original covering mound are still visible along the northern side and at the eastern end. The site is approximately 8 kilometres east of Lough Gur, itself one of the most archaeologically significant lake landscapes in Ireland, and about 5 kilometres to the north-east of the village of Hospital.
The tomb sits roughly 300 metres below the summit of Cromwell Hill, which rises to 586 feet, on what the survey describes as steep but flat-topped pasture land. It is working farmland, so access requires consideration and awareness of the terrain underfoot. The views it commands, particularly to the south-east, are a reminder that the people who built these structures consistently chose elevated positions with wide sightlines, whatever their reasons. The stone that may be a collapsed portico sidestone, measuring nearly 3 metres by 1.25 metres, lies prostrate to the north of the western end; it is easy to overlook among the scattered slabs, but it is one of the larger pieces on the site and worth locating to get a sense of the original scale of the structure.