Megalithic tomb, Ceann Eich, Co. Kerry
Co. Kerry |
Megalithic Tombs
On a south-facing slope at Ceann Eich in County Kerry, a small megalithic tomb sits with its back against a natural rock outcrop and its open end pointing towards the estuary of the Inny river.
It is compact, low to the ground, and easy to miss, but it is remarkably well-preserved. A single irregular roof-stone, roughly 1.5 metres by 1 metre, caps a wedge-shaped chamber whose walls taper from southwest to northeast, narrowing and dropping in height as they go. One side of the chamber is formed by a single long slab that leans slightly inwards; the other by two upright stones, called orthostats, set with a notable regularity. At the rear, a short section of drystone walling closes things off. Traces of a cairn, the mound of stones that would originally have covered and defined the tomb, are still visible on the northern side. What makes the structure particularly unusual is the way the roof-stone is partly supported not by the uprights beneath it, but by the natural bedrock of the outcrop to its northeast, as though the builders worked the monument deliberately into the landscape rather than simply placing it upon it.
Wedge tombs, of which this is a representative example, are the most numerous megalithic tomb type in Ireland and are generally associated with the late Neolithic and early Bronze Age, roughly four to five thousand years ago. They are distributed widely across the country but appear with particular density in the west. This one, recorded and described as part of an archaeological survey of the Iveragh Peninsula compiled by A. O'Sullivan and J. Sheehan and published by Cork University Press in 1996, sits in a landscape that carries further layers of the past alongside it. Immediately to the south lies a children's burial ground, a type of site known in Irish tradition as a cillín, where infants who died unbaptised were interred outside consecrated ground. The proximity of the two monuments, one prehistoric and one from a more recent folk tradition, is not unusual in the Irish countryside, where such places often accumulated across centuries around features that seemed, for whatever reason, already set apart.