Megalithic tomb - court tomb, Prospecthill, Co. Galway
Co. Galway |
Megalithic Tombs
In a field near Mweeloon Bay in County Galway, a cluster of large stones sits pushed against a fence line, shunted there by a bulldozer in 1964.
They are all that physically remains of a court tomb, a type of megalithic monument built during the Neolithic period, typically comprising a roofed stone gallery leading from an unroofed forecourt, and used for communal burial over many centuries. Before its destruction, the tomb at Prospecthill was a recognisable, if ruined, structure: a gallery roughly 5.5 metres long, aligned northwest to southeast, divided into two chambers by a low sill-stone set across the floor. The entrance at the southeast end stood between two upright jamb stones, and a single courtstone flanked the northern jamb, a surviving trace of the forecourt arrangement that gives these monuments their name.
The tomb had been documented by scholars across several decades. George Holt noted it as early as 1912, and it appeared again in a 1952 account by McCaffrey, by which point it was already in a ruinous state. Ruaidhrí de Valera and Seán Ó Nualláin included it in their systematic Survey of the Megalithic Tombs of Ireland, published in 1972, recording what they could of its structural details, including a large displaced stone lying in the front chamber that may once have served as a roofstone. But by the time their volume appeared in print, the tomb itself had already been gone for eight years, cleared away during land improvement works in 1964. The orthostats, the large upright stones that formed the walls of the gallery, were not removed from the field but simply pushed to the northern boundary fence, where they presumably remain.
The site today offers nothing in the way of a monument to inspect. What it does offer, for anyone interested in making the short walk through pastureland to the inner shore of Mweeloon Bay, is a concrete example of how much was lost across rural Ireland in the mid-twentieth century, when land clearance programmes and agricultural improvement schemes removed ancient structures with little or no oversight. The stones at the fence line are identifiable from de Valera and Ó Nualláin's published record, which remains the most detailed account of what once stood here.