Griddle-more-na Vean, Caltragh, Co. Sligo
Co. Sligo |
Megalithic Tombs
In a county already thick with megalithic monuments, the site known locally as Griddle-more-na Vean, near Caltragh in County Sligo, carries one of those wonderfully strange Irish place-names that hints at something older and stranger than the landscape now reveals.
The name itself, a phonetic rendering of Irish, gestures toward folklore rather than official cartography, the kind of name that gets passed down through conversation rather than written into deeds.
The site is recorded in Seán Ó Nualláin's authoritative Survey of the Megalithic Tombs of Ireland, Volume V, which covered County Sligo and was published by the Stationery Office in Dublin in 1989. Ó Nualláin's survey was a systematic effort to catalogue the megalithic monuments of Ireland, a category that includes court tombs, portal tombs, passage tombs, and wedge tombs, all of them stone structures raised during the Neolithic and early Bronze Age periods, roughly between five thousand and three and a half thousand years ago. County Sligo is particularly well furnished with such monuments; the Carrowmore complex alone ranks among the largest megalithic cemeteries in Europe, and the region around Caltragh sits within a landscape that has been shaped, marked, and interpreted by human communities across millennia. That Griddle-more-na Vean appears in Ó Nualláin's volume places it within this long tradition of monument-building, even if the precise character and condition of the site are not detailed in what survives of the available record.