Megalithic tomb - wedge tomb, Caherfurvaus, Co. Galway

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Megalithic Tombs

Megalithic tomb – wedge tomb, Caherfurvaus, Co. Galway

In the level pastureland of Caherfurvaus, among the outcropping limestone that punctuates so much of County Galway's agricultural ground, a small arrangement of stones marks what was once a place of burial.

It does not announce itself. Two sidestones, gradually decreasing in height from west to east, define a chamber roughly two metres long and just under a metre and a half wide, its interior now packed with field stones that spill outward for about three metres in either direction. The whole thing is aligned on a northeast to southwest axis, a quiet geometry laid down in the prehistoric past.

The structure is believed to be a wedge tomb, a type of megalithic monument common across Ireland and particularly concentrated in the west. Wedge tombs are so called because the chamber narrows and lowers towards one end, typically the east, which is exactly the pattern visible here. They date broadly to the late Neolithic and early Bronze Age, somewhere in the range of 4,000 to 5,000 years ago, and were used for communal burial. The accumulation of field stones filling and surrounding the chamber at Caherfurvaus has obscured much of the original structure, making a confident identification difficult, though the form of the surviving sidestones is consistent with the type. Sites like this one are often overlooked precisely because their remains are modest and partly buried, blending into the rocky pastoral landscape that has grown up around them over millennia.

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