Boulder-burial, Knocks By.), Co. Cork

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Burial Sites

Boulder-burial, Knocks By.), Co. Cork

In a level patch of rolling Cork pasture, three enormous slabs of stone sit propped off the ground on smaller support stones, arranged in a loose triangle roughly a metre and a half apart from one another.

This is a boulder burial, a monument type particular to the southwest of Ireland, in which a large capstone is raised above a small number of uprights, covering what was likely a Bronze Age funerary deposit. The effect is something between a table and a dolmen, though more irregular and earthbound than either, and the grouping of three together in this configuration is notably unusual.

Each of the three monuments at Knocks has its own character. The boulder to the north-east, measuring around 1.8 metres by 1.7 metres and nearly a metre thick, rests on four support stones. To the south-west, a roughly circular slab some 2.4 metres in diameter sits above at least five supports, making it the broadest of the trio. The north-west monument is slightly more modest in plan, its cover stone measuring 2 metres by 1.3 metres, with two visible supports beneath. Just eight metres to the east of this grouping sits a ringfort, a roughly circular enclosure of the early medieval period, typically defined by an earthen bank and used as a farmstead or place of refuge. The proximity of a Bronze Age funerary cluster to a much later settlement feature is not planned coincidence; these landscapes were layered over millennia, each generation of inhabitants working around or in relation to what had already been left behind.

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