Megalithic tomb - wedge tomb, Kilmackowen, Co. Cork

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Megalithic Tombs

Megalithic tomb – wedge tomb, Kilmackowen, Co. Cork

On the north side of Eagle Hill, towards the western end of the Beara peninsula, a prehistoric tomb has been quietly absorbed into a field fence.

It is easy to imagine it going unnoticed: the chamber measures only about one and a half metres long and less than a metre wide, covered by a single roofstone, with one sidestone on each flank and a backstone set into the eastern end. What remains is the bare minimum of a wedge tomb, a burial monument type built by farming communities in Ireland during the late Neolithic and early Bronze Age, typically characterised by a gallery that narrows and lowers from one end to the other. Here that tapering runs west to east, with the chamber open at the wider, taller western end.

The structure was documented by Ruaidhrí de Valera and Seán Ó Nualláin in their survey of megalithic tombs across Counties Cork, Kerry, Limerick, and Tipperary, published in 1982. Their account notes that a stone inside the western end of the south side may represent some form of entrance feature, and that two outer-wall stones survive to the north of the chamber. There is no evidence of a surrounding mound, which on a site like this could mean the mound has long since dispersed, or that the monument was always more modest in its earthwork than others of its type. The northwest-facing slope on which it sits, exposed to the Atlantic weather that defines the Beara, has not been kind to whatever once surrounded it.

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