Megalithic tomb - wedge tomb, Allihies, Co. Cork

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Megalithic Tombs

Megalithic tomb – wedge tomb, Allihies, Co. Cork

On a boggy saddle south of Knocknagallaun, on the Beara Peninsula in west Cork, a small megalithic tomb sits so quietly in the rush-covered pasture that it has, at some point in the not-too-distant past, been partially dismantled to build a peat storage platform.

That the monument was used as a convenient quarry by turf-cutters is not unusual in rural Ireland, but it gives this particular site an oddly layered quality: a structure built to last millennia, pressed into service as a utilitarian shelf for cut bog fuel.

The tomb is a wedge tomb, a monument type that appears across Ireland from roughly 2500 BC onwards, characterised by a gallery that narrows from west to east, typically aligned to face the setting sun. This example follows that pattern closely. Its gallery measures just over two metres in length and tapers from 1.1 metres wide at the western end to 0.85 metres at the eastern. The northern side is formed by a single upright stone, the southern by two. No backstone survives at the eastern end. A large slab, with an exposed surface of around 1.5 metres by 1.9 metres, lies partly buried in peat about 25 centimetres to the southeast of the gallery and may once have served as a roofstone, shifted from its original position at some unknown point. Beside the gallery, just to the south at the edge of a slope, the rectangular platform that likely consumed some of the tomb's original stonework is still visible. The tomb looks out to the southwest over Ballydonegan Bay, a view that, for whatever reason, the people who built it chose deliberately.

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Pete F
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