Megalithic tomb - wedge tomb, Rahalisk, Co. Cork

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Megalithic Tombs

Megalithic tomb – wedge tomb, Rahalisk, Co. Cork

On a south-facing terrace in the Boggeragh Mountains foothills, a prehistoric burial chamber sits quietly overlooking the valley of the Awboy River.

What makes this particular spot quietly arresting is not just the age of the structure, but its company: another wedge tomb of the same type lies only 300 metres to the west, making this corner of County Cork an unusually concentrated pocket of prehistoric funerary activity.

A wedge tomb is a gallery tomb of the Neolithic to Early Bronze Age, typically built so that the chamber narrows and lowers from one end to the other, like a stone wedge laid on its side. This example runs along a northwest-to-southeast axis, which is the conventional orientation for the type, and its dimensions are still legible despite the millennia. The gallery extends roughly four metres in length, widest at its centre at around 1.4 metres and narrowing sharply at the eastern end to just half a metre. Nine sidestones survive in total, five along the northern wall and four to the south, though no backstone remains visible. A substantial roofstone, measuring approximately 2.4 by 2 metres, still covers the southern section of the gallery. A second roofstone, slightly smaller, has slipped from its original position and now lies at an angle near the western end, which is partly blocked with accumulated fill. Two outer-wall stones, one to each side of the gallery, hint at the broader structural envelope that once enclosed the whole. The low mounded material visible to the north, west, and south of the gallery is thought to be the product of later field clearance rather than original cairn material, a common fate for monuments in areas that were subsequently farmed.

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