Megalithic tomb - court tomb, Killygorman, Co. Monaghan

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Megalithic Tombs

Megalithic tomb – court tomb, Killygorman, Co. Monaghan

What stops you on a drumlin ridge in County Monaghan is the sheer scale of the entrance stones.

The court tomb at Killygorman sits in a slight col along an ENE-WSW ridge, and while the surrounding landscape has the rounded, repetitive quality that glacial drumlins tend to produce, the monument itself insists on being noticed. The two front entry jambs are exceptionally large and unusually well matched, a pairing that suggests considerable care and deliberate selection by whoever raised them here, somewhere in the Neolithic period, perhaps five thousand years ago.

Court tombs are among the oldest megalithic monument types in Ireland, characterised by a long stone cairn with a roofed gallery divided into chambers, and often with a forecourt area at the entrance where ritual activity, possibly related to communal burial or ancestor veneration, is thought to have taken place. At Killygorman, the cairn runs roughly WNW-ESE and measures around thirty metres in length and up to nine metres across. The gallery, set fifteen metres in from the western end, is about nine metres long and just over a metre wide. It is divided into two chambers by segmenting jambs, upright stones that project inward to narrow the passage and create distinct internal spaces. The entry jambs at the western end are doubled, meaning two pairs of uprights frame the entrance rather than one, with the front pair being the most imposing stones surviving on site. Towards the eastern end of the gallery, one stone is positioned slightly inside the line of the chamber wall, which may point to a further division that has since been lost or disturbed. Three kerb stones, the low edging stones that would originally have defined the cairn's perimeter, survive on the northern side of the gallery.

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