Giants Graves, Garran, Co. Monaghan

Co. Monaghan |

Megalithic Tombs

Giants Graves, Garran, Co. Monaghan

In County Monaghan, a Neolithic monument that once ranked among the more architecturally unusual megalithic tombs in Ireland was quietly taken apart.

By the early twentieth century it was essentially gone, leaving behind only a handful of stones along a field boundary and a name, Giants Graves, that still gestures at what had stood there for millennia.

The site at Garran was a dual court tomb, a rare form in which two roofed stone galleries were arranged back to back, their open forecourts facing in opposite directions. Court tombs are among Ireland's oldest megalithic monuments, typically dating to the Neolithic period, around 4000 to 3500 BC, and the court, an open semicircular area formed by standing stones at the entrance, is thought to have served a ceremonial function before or during burial. The Garran example was more elaborate than most, comprising two separate two-chambered galleries set roughly four metres apart and aligned north to south. An Ordnance Survey plan made around 1835, and later analysed by the scholar Ó Nualláin, recorded the layout in enough detail to reconstruct its general form: the northern gallery measured approximately four metres in length, the southern one slightly longer at around 4.4 metres. At some point between 1857 and 1907 the structure was removed, the stones most likely cleared for agricultural reasons, a fate that befell a great many Irish megalithic monuments during the nineteenth century. The site sits on a gentle rise in a broad westward-facing valley, with the headwaters of a small stream running just to the south, a placement characteristic of Neolithic builders who often selected elevated ground near water.

What remains today is sparse: two stones still set in position and three others displaced, all running along the southern side of an east-west road fence, and thought to represent a fragment of the original court. It is less a monument now than a trace, readable mainly if you already know what to look for.

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