Megalithic tomb - court tomb, Letterfrack, Co. Galway

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Megalithic Tombs

Megalithic tomb – court tomb, Letterfrack, Co. Galway

At the western foot of Diamond Hill, within Connemara National Park, a small arrangement of stones sits in a state of considerable ruin.

It is classified as a court tomb, a type of Neolithic monument that typically features a semicircular or oval forecourt opening onto a roofed gallery used for communal burial. This one, however, lacks that defining court entirely, which makes it something of an awkward fit for its own category.

What survives is a gallery roughly 5.5 metres long, oriented north to south, and divided into two chambers by a pair of jamb stones set transversely across the passage. Jamb stones in this context are upright slabs placed across the width of the gallery to create internal divisions, a common feature in Irish megalithic architecture. The southern end of the structure has been disturbed, and what remains there appears to be the remnants of a later field wall, the kind of quiet, incremental damage that has affected countless prehistoric monuments across Ireland, where farmers and landowners over centuries quarried or repurposed ancient stonework without necessarily knowing or caring what it was. Gibbons and Higgins noted this interference in 1988, and the picture they described is of a monument that has been slowly absorbed into the landscape it once marked.

The tomb sits within the boundaries of Connemara National Park, so it is accessible to visitors exploring the Diamond Hill area. Those walking the hill's lower western slopes may find the remains easier to pass by than to identify, given how thoroughly the structure has merged with the surrounding terrain.

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Pete F
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