Dolmen (dismantled), Carrowmore, Co. Sligo

Co. Sligo |

Megalithic Tombs

Dolmen (dismantled), Carrowmore, Co. Sligo

At Carrowmore in County Sligo, one of the largest and oldest passage tomb cemeteries in Ireland, not every monument has survived intact.

Among the numbered tombs and well-documented megalithic structures sits something quieter and considerably more diminished: an oval raised area, roughly five metres by three, scattered with five gneiss boulders. It is the kind of remnant that rewards attention precisely because so much of it is gone.

When the antiquarian George Petrie visited in August 1837, he noted a small stone circle standing about twenty paces south of the monument recorded as No. 19. He counted the remains of twelve stones, but observed that five had recently been removed. Half a century later, W.G. Wood-Martin recorded that an excavation had been attempted, though it yielded nothing. By 1940, the Ordnance Survey's 25-Inch Name Book was more blunt: only four supporting stones and a hollow in the ground remained. The structure described by Petrie, already damaged within living memory of his visit, had continued to deteriorate across the decades between those accounts. What survives now is one stone more than the 1940 record suggests, though the overall picture is much the same: a site that has been progressively reduced, first by removal and then by time, to a low mound and a handful of boulders. Gneiss, the stone type present here, is a coarse-grained metamorphic rock common in the west of Ireland and used throughout the Carrowmore complex, connecting this fragmentary structure to the broader prehistoric landscape around it.

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