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

Co. Clare |

Megalithic Tombs

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

A field near Milltown in County Clare holds a name that far outlasted the monument it described.

Marked on the 1840 edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map as "Dermot and Grania's Bed", the site belongs to a widespread Irish tradition of attaching the doomed lovers of Fenian mythology to megalithic tombs and other ancient stone features scattered across the landscape. The logic was simple enough: wherever large, mysterious stones were arranged in a roughly human outline, local imagination placed the sleeping fugitives. What made this particular example unusual was the precision with which it was once recorded, and the completeness with which it subsequently vanished.

The Ordnance Survey letters, compiled in the nineteenth century as part of the broader mapping effort, described the feature in considerable detail: a coffin-shaped enclosure some nineteen and a half feet in length, wider at the head than the foot, formed by a number of large upright stones set a short distance apart and following the outline of the grave. By the time the antiquarian Thomas Johnson Westropp visited and noted it in 1902, the original megalithic tomb, most likely a wedge tomb or similar prehistoric burial monument, had already been destroyed. What he found instead he described as a cist, the term for a smaller stone-lined grave box, suggesting he was looking at scattered remnants rather than an intact structure. Ruaidhrí de Valera and Seán Ó Nualláin, whose survey of Clare's megalithic tombs was published in 1961, concluded that the tomb had been dismantled before Westropp's visit, and that the few partially buried blocks he observed were no longer in their original positions. A site inspection carried out in 2017 found nothing visible at ground level at all.

What remains, then, is a name on an old map and a set of measurements for something that no longer exists. The field itself, gently undulating with rock outcrop close to the surface, gives no outward sign of what once stood there.

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