Megalithic tomb - wedge tomb, Aghadrumgowna, Co. Cavan

Co. Cavan |

Megalithic Tombs

Megalithic tomb – wedge tomb, Aghadrumgowna, Co. Cavan

On a slope in County Cavan, about three kilometres north-east of Laragh village, a D-shaped mound of stone holds a burial chamber that has been out of sight for millennia.

The cairn, roughly 16.5 metres long, 13 metres wide, and 1.5 metres high, looks substantial enough from the outside, but the chamber at its core sits entirely buried, covered by two large slabs that may originally have formed a single roofstone. It is the kind of monument that rewards attention precisely because so much of it is concealed.

This is a wedge tomb, a form of megalithic monument built in Ireland during the late Neolithic and into the early Bronze Age, generally characterised by a gallery that narrows and lowers toward its closed end. Here the gallery runs roughly west to east and extends about six metres, flanked by straight outer walling. A tall septal stone, a dividing slab set across the interior, separates a short portico near the entrance from the main chamber beyond. Facade stones flank the entrance, two to the north and one to the south, giving the monument a formal, structured face. A lone standing stone, or orthostat, sits beyond the eastern end of the gallery; its precise role is unclear, and it may simply be a displaced outer wall stone. Two further stones aligned with the backstone of the gallery are similarly unexplained, noted by Ruaidhrí de Valera and Seán Ó Nualláin in their 1972 survey of the megalithic tombs of Ireland without firm interpretation. That kind of unresolved detail is not unusual in monuments of this age, where centuries of disturbance and the sheer weight of accumulated cairn material have scrambled the original arrangement beyond easy reading.

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