Cave, Carrowbunnaun, Co. Sligo

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Caves & Shelters

Cave, Carrowbunnaun, Co. Sligo

Knocknarea mountain in County Sligo is most often associated with the great cairn at its summit, traditionally said to mark the grave of the legendary queen Medb.

But the western cliffs of the mountain conceal something quieter and considerably stranger: a network of 26 small caves, one of which appears to have served Neolithic people not as a dwelling, but as a place to leave their dead. The cave in question, designated Cave K, opens through a small, low entrance on a short steep slope at the north-eastern end of the cliff face. A narrow squeeze leads into a passage barely a metre wide and in places only half a metre high, ending in a calcite choke 26 metres in. Sixteen metres along, a tight aperture connects it to a neighbouring cave, Cave J, running parallel to it through the rock.

In 2013, fragments of human bone were found scattered across a two-metre stretch of the passage floor, just three and a half metres from the entrance. A two-day rescue excavation followed in November of that year, led by Dowd and Kahlert, who focused on recording and retrieving the exposed bone rather than digging into the cave sediments below. The assemblage amounted to 13 human bones, all of them small skeletal elements and most fragmentary. Radiocarbon dating of three of the bones returned Neolithic dates, placing them in the broad period roughly 4000 to 2500 BC. The remains represented at least two individuals: an adult aged between 30 and 39, and a child aged between 4 and 6. No artefacts were found alongside them. The excavators noted that the distribution of bones was consistent with excarnation, a practice in which a body is left exposed, sometimes in a natural feature such as a cave, so that flesh decomposes or is stripped away before the bones are gathered for burial elsewhere. If that interpretation holds, Cave K was not a tomb but a staging post in a longer funerary process. A second cave roughly 50 metres to the south-east, Cave C, has also yielded Neolithic human remains, suggesting this particular stretch of cliff held deliberate significance for the people who used it.

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