Boulder-burial, Lohart, Co. Kerry

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Burial Sites

Boulder-burial, Lohart, Co. Kerry

In a private garden off the Kenmare to Castletownbere road in south-west Kerry, a large flat slab lies in the grass, all that physically remains of what was once a prehistoric funerary monument set inside a stone circle.

A boulder-burial is broadly what it sounds like: a substantial capstone, typically of considerable weight, placed directly on the ground or raised slightly on small supporting stones over a burial deposit. What makes the Lohart example quietly melancholy is the contrast between what was recorded and what survives.

When an Ordnance Survey correspondent documented the site in 1841, it still retained something of its original form. He described it as a cromlech, extending east to west and inclining noticeably to the east, with a top flag measuring six feet by five feet and over a foot thick, supported by three small stones no more than three feet in height. It sat at the centre of a multiple-stone circle, a configuration that places it within a distinctly south-west Munster tradition of prehistoric monument-building. Somewhere between that 1841 account and the present day, the supporting stones and the circle itself were lost or removed, leaving only the capstone slab, which measures up to 1.8 metres at its longest. The site is catalogued in Ó Nualláin's 1978 study of such monuments, which recognised it as a possible boulder-burial rather than a confirmed one, a distinction that reflects both the damaged state of the structure and the difficulty of classifying a monument stripped of its context.

The slab sits in the garden of a private house, so it is not freely accessible in the way a roadside monument might be. Its location north of the Kenmare to Castletownbere road, roughly nine and a half kilometres south-west of Kenmare, places it in a stretch of Kerry that contains several prehistoric sites, though this particular one is easy to overlook precisely because so little of it now stands above ground.

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