Megalithic tomb - wedge tomb, Céim Chorrbhuaile, Co. Cork

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Megalithic Tombs

Megalithic tomb – wedge tomb, Céim Chorrbhuaile, Co. Cork

In the boggy ground on the eastern side of the Owengarriff River valley in County Cork, a prehistoric tomb has been quietly sinking into the landscape for millennia.

What was once a deliberate and presumably significant funerary monument has, over the centuries, become partly submerged in bog and pressed into service as a dump for field clearance stone. That double indignity, one natural, one agricultural, has left the structure in a compromised but still legible state.

This is a wedge tomb, a type of megalithic monument common in the west and south of Ireland, typically dating from the late Neolithic or early Bronze Age. Wedge tombs generally consist of a roofed stone gallery, wider and higher at one end, set within a low mound. At Céim Chorrbhuaile, the gallery runs along an ESE to WNW alignment and measures 2.1 metres in length and roughly 0.9 metres in width. Two sidestones stand to the north of the gallery, three to the south, with a backstone set into the eastern end. The whole is covered by two overlapping roofstones, which remain largely in place. No outer walling survives and there is no visible trace of any surrounding mound, though the boggy burial of the lower structure makes it difficult to be certain what may lie beneath. Ruaidhrí de Valera and Seán Ó Nualláin recorded the monument in their 1982 survey of megalithic tombs across Counties Cork, Kerry, Limerick, and Tipperary. Notably, a second wedge tomb stands just 150 metres to the north-north-west, suggesting this part of the Owengarriff valley, a tributary of the River Lee, held some particular significance to the people who built here.

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