Druid's Altar, Poulaphuca, Co. Clare

Co. Clare |

Megalithic Tombs

Druid’s Altar, Poulaphuca, Co. Clare

The name given to this place by locals, Druid's Altar, is the kind of fanciful label that tends to obscure rather than illuminate what something actually is.

What sits on the rough grazing above Poulaphuca in County Clare is a wedge tomb, a type of megalithic burial monument built during the late Neolithic or early Bronze Age, distinguished by a long stone chamber that widens and rises toward one end like a shallow wedge. This one is unusually well preserved. Its capstone, measuring 3.25 metres in length, rests intact across both sidestones and the backstone, and the whole structure remains centrally placed within a roughly circular cairn of about nine metres in diameter. The orientation is towards the south-southwest, which is typical of the wedge tomb tradition, and the chamber opens onto a long view down a steep northeast-facing slope toward the valley below, with the Turlough Hill cairn visible roughly 6.5 kilometres to the north-northeast.

The four upright stones forming the chamber, two sidestones, a backstone, and a sillstone at the entrance end, are a study in small distinctions. The two sidestones are undressed, their upper edges left rough, one slightly rounded and one stepped and squarish in section. The backstone, however, has been dressed along its upper edge, and a quarter-circle opening has been deliberately worked into its top northern corner, a detail that suggests considerable care in the original construction. The sillstone at the entrance has its upper edge worn smooth, which may speak to long use or simply to the character of the stone. One corner of the backstone has since broken away, though without the same clear evidence of human intention. An arc of low stone slabs within the cairn, running roughly north of the chamber, may represent an internal kerb from an earlier phase of construction. The monument does not sit in isolation: two further grassed-over cairns lie within 70 metres to the northwest, and the field itself is crossed by mound walls and slab walls that form part of a much larger multiperiod field system extending across the plateau and into the neighbouring townlands of Cragballyconoal and Eanty More.

The site sits on rough grazing on the upper edge of a steep slope, so the approach is likely uneven underfoot. The two nearby cairns, the closer of which contains a cist, a small stone-lined burial box, are visible as low grassed mounds. Looking north-northeast on a clear day, the Turlough Hill cairn on the horizon provides a sense of how densely this landscape was marked out by its prehistoric inhabitants.

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