Carrigeenmullowna, Carranduff, Co. Sligo
Co. Sligo |
Megalithic Tombs
County Sligo is well known among archaeologists for its concentration of megalithic monuments, but even within that landscape, Carrigeenmullowna in the townland of Carranduff represents the kind of site that tends to slip past general notice.
The area around it belongs to one of the most densely settled prehistoric regions in Ireland, where passage tombs, court tombs, and portal dolmens were raised across hillsides and bogland over thousands of years during the Neolithic period, roughly five to three thousand years before the common era. That so many survive in some form in Sligo owes much to the relative isolation of the landscape in later centuries, which slowed the clearance and agricultural reworking that erased comparable monuments elsewhere.
The principal scholarly account of the site comes from Seán Ó Nualláin's Survey of the Megalithic Tombs of Ireland, Volume V, covering County Sligo, published by the Stationery Office in Dublin in 1989. Ó Nualláin's survey was a systematic attempt to catalogue the megalithic tomb tradition across the country, distinguishing between tomb types and recording their condition, orientation, and structural elements where these could still be read. Megalithic tombs, broadly speaking, are funerary monuments constructed from large stones, typically dating to the Neolithic, and they took several distinct regional forms in Ireland. The Carrigeenmullowna site at Carranduff falls within this documented tradition, though the sparse surviving detail makes it difficult to say more about its specific character without access to the full survey volume.