Dermot and Grania's Bed, Cooleamore, Co. Clare

Co. Clare |

Megalithic Tombs

Dermot and Grania’s Bed, Cooleamore, Co. Clare

In the folklore of prehistoric monuments, the fugitive lovers Diarmuid and Gráinne managed to sleep in what seems like every megalithic tomb in Ireland.

The name attached to this particular structure in Cooleamore, County Clare, follows a pattern found at dozens of sites across the country, where local tradition assigned the ancient stones to the couple's mythological flight from the pursuing Fionn Mac Cumhaill. It is a romantic overlay on something far older and more functional: a wedge tomb, a type of megalithic burial monument built in Ireland during the late Neolithic and early Bronze Age, typically characterised by a rectangular or trapezoidal stone chamber that narrows and lowers towards the rear. This one sits at the southern end of a low, rush-covered ridge of pasture, with open views to the south, and had been named and mapped by the time the first Ordnance Survey six-inch sheets were produced in 1842, with the name still appearing on the 1916 edition.

The tomb is moderately well preserved. Its chamber, orientated towards the south-west, measures roughly 3.1 metres in length, widening from about 1.9 metres at the rear to 2.1 metres at the front. The northern sidestone, over three metres long and nearly two metres high at its tallest point, remains essentially in place, though it leans southward; its upper edge was dressed, suggesting deliberate shaping by its builders. The southern sidestone has not fared as well, surviving only as four low fragments, though five fallen slabs nearby indicate it was originally of comparable size to its counterpart. The backstone, also dressed along its upper edge, stands 1.5 metres high, with an irregularly shaped slab propped against its outer face. The antiquarian T. J. Westropp, writing in 1907, wondered whether a loose block lying to the west might point to a longer original chamber, but the scholars Ruaidhrí de Valera and Seán Ó Nualláin, whose 1961 survey of Clare's megalithic tombs remains a foundational reference, considered this uncertain. Pressing in close around the monument on all sides are the long, parallel ridges of post-medieval lazy beds, the raised cultivation strips once used to grow potatoes, a reminder that the land around this Bronze Age structure was being worked hard in far more recent centuries. A second wedge tomb is visible in the neighbouring townland of Cooleabeg, less than a kilometre to the north-west.

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