Megalithic tomb, Kilcavan, Co. Wexford

Co. Wexford |

Megalithic Tombs

Megalithic tomb, Kilcavan, Co. Wexford

At the northern base of Tara Hill in County Wexford, where the slope meets flatter ground, there once stood a dolmen, a type of megalithic tomb typically formed by large upright stones supporting a single massive capstone.

By 1987 it was gone, and a hayshed occupies the spot today. What makes this particular disappearance quietly striking is how well documented the vanishing act was, and how gradual the erasure appears to have been.

The structure appears on the 1940 edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map, labelled simply as a dolmen, and a description from that same year places it on the western side of a stone wall running northwest to southeast, a wall that formed the eastern boundary of a farmyard. At that time, a large capstone, roughly 2.4 metres long, a metre wide, and about half a metre thick, still rested on upright stones at the western end. Local reports recorded in the Ordnance Survey Field Memoirs suggest that even then the capstone had already been shifted from its original north-south orientation at some earlier point, meaning the monument had been interfered with before it was formally recorded. Sometime between that 1940 description and a survey carried out in 1987, the stones were removed entirely.

There is nothing to see at the site now. Its interest lies less in what survives than in what the sequence of records reveals: a prehistoric tomb that endured long enough to be mapped, described, and measured, yet disappeared within living memory of that documentation, absorbed quietly into the working farmyard that had surrounded it for years.

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Pete F
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