Megalithic tomb - court tomb, Cashlan, Co. Monaghan

No edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map had ever recorded it. The only reason its location was eventually pinned down at all was that a schoolmaster, speaking to the archaeologist Oliver Davies, recalled that local people knew the spot as a place where "tunnels" had once existed. Those tunnels were the corbelled chambers of a monument that, when it still stood in the early nineteenth century, was among the more elaborate examples of its type in Ulster.

A court tomb is a Neolithic communal burial monument, typically consisting of a roofless semicircular forecourt leading into one or more roofed gallery chambers, all set within an elongated stone cairn. The Cashlan example, when described in 1841 by a Reverend T. Stopford in newspaper reports later quoted by Borlase in 1897, was considerably more complex than most. The cairn measured roughly 46 feet by 16 feet and contained not one gallery but a sequence of seven chambers: an oval entrance room arching to about six feet in height, its corbelled roof so finely fitted that, as Stopford put it, "the point of a penknife could scarcely be inserted" between the stones, and then a further six square apartments opening off a central corridor. The entrance stones into the corridor were worn smooth on one side, which Stopford attributed, with some relish, to the weapons of returning hunters. More puzzling to him were the flagstones used for the floor and the outer roof covering. He identified them as a sandstone resembling material found along the Clyde in Scotland, entirely unlike anything quarried locally; the nearest freestone source, at Carrowmore Mountain in Fermanagh, was about twenty miles away and produced stone of a different character entirely. Among the finds was a round sandstone slab with carved markings on it, which the landowner initially denied having found. It was broken by one of his children and later came into Stopford's possession in several pieces. By the time anyone thought to make a systematic record, a treasure-hunter had already gutted the interior, removing everything except the largest upright stones and part of the floor. The structure was entirely gone before the middle of the twentieth century, its outline surviving only in a sketch plan made by Windele and published in Borlase's 1897 volume.