Megalithic structure, Tawnaghbaun, Co. Galway

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Megalithic Tombs

Megalithic structure, Tawnaghbaun, Co. Galway

On a low, exposed headland on the western side of Cashel Bay in Connemara, there is a small stone structure that resists easy explanation.

It measures roughly 1.7 metres long, 0.6 metres wide, and just 0.3 metres high, aligned east to west, open at both ends, and covered by a single partly cracked capstone. One of its walls is not dressed or placed stone at all, but a natural rock shelf incorporated directly into the design. It is, in other words, a monument that has made use of what the landscape already offered, blurring the line between the deliberate and the accidental.

Archaeologists have tentatively suggested it may be a cist, a type of small stone-lined burial box typically associated with the Bronze Age, often used to contain human remains or grave goods beneath a covering slab. The qualification matters here, though: researchers Gibbons and Higgins, writing in 1988, noted the possibility, and Tim Robinson observed the structure in 1985, but the remains are simply too slight and ambiguous for any definitive classification to be made. Whether something has been lost to centuries of exposure on this windswept headland, or whether the structure was always this minimal, is not known. What survives is a chamber just large enough to have once held a crouched burial, though no such evidence is recorded.

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