Megalithic tomb - wedge tomb, Ceathrú An Teampaill, Co. Galway

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Megalithic Tombs

Megalithic tomb – wedge tomb, Ceathrú An Teampaill, Co. Galway

On the western edge of Inis Meáin, the middle of the three Aran Islands, a prehistoric tomb sits close to the lip of a limestone terrace that drops away towards the Atlantic.

What remains is fragmentary: a single northern sidestone tilted sharply southward, two southern sidestones lying flat, and a large roofstone that has slipped from its original position and now rests across them. A scatter of displaced slabs covers the western end of what was once a gallery roughly three metres in length, oriented east to west. Faint traces of a cairn, the mound of rubble that would originally have enclosed the structure, are still just visible around the edges.

This is a wedge tomb, a type of megalithic burial monument built during the late Neolithic and into the early Bronze Age, so named because the gallery chamber tapers in both height and width from one end to the other. Wedge tombs are the most numerous megalithic tomb type in Ireland, and they cluster particularly in the west of the country, where the Aran Islands sit atop one of the most extensive limestone landscapes in Europe. What makes this example quietly remarkable is where it was built: directly onto bare rock, with no soil preparation beneath it. The topography of Inis Meáin, scoured and fissured karst limestone with only thin pockets of earth, left the builders little choice, and the tomb has weathered accordingly. Tim Robinson, whose meticulous survey of the Aran Islands documented the site in 1980, recorded it in the condition it retains today, deeply ruined but still legible as a deliberate human structure placed with clear intention at the edge of the island and the edge of the land.

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