Dermot & Grania's Bed, Ceathrú An Lisín, Co. Galway
Co. Galway |
Megalithic Tombs
On the middle island of Aran, Inis Meáin, there is a scheduled national monument that no longer exists.
The spot where it stood, in an area of small pasture fields to the north-northeast of and below Baile an Mhothair, holds no visible trace of the structure that once occupied it. The name alone survives: Dermot and Grania's Bed, one of dozens of megalithic sites across Ireland that carry this folkloric label, attaching the doomed lovers of Fenian mythology to ancient stones as though the landscape itself remembered their flight.
When the structure was recorded in 1839, it was still largely intact. Two sidestones, each roughly 3.25 metres long, formed a narrow chamber. A slab closed the southeast end, though it had been partially displaced, while the north end remained open. A single horizontal roofstone lay across the top of the sidestones. This arrangement, a tapering chamber closed at one end and open at the other, is characteristic of a wedge-tomb, a type of megalithic burial monument built during the late Neolithic and early Bronze Age, typically between around 2500 and 2000 BC. Ruaidhrí de Valera and Seán Ó Nualláin, who catalogued the megalithic tombs of Ireland in a landmark mid-twentieth-century survey, identified it as a simple example of this type. At some point after 1839, the stones were removed or collapsed entirely, and no trace has been found since.
