Megalithic structure, Carrowmore, Co. Sligo

Co. Sligo |

Megalithic Tombs

Megalithic structure, Carrowmore, Co. Sligo

Within the Carrowmore passage tomb cemetery in County Sligo, one of the largest and oldest concentrations of megalithic monuments in Ireland, there is a place where a tomb once stood that has now almost entirely ceased to exist.

Not ruined, exactly, not collapsed or overgrown, but actively removed, stone by stone, until by 1888 there was nothing left to see at all. What remains today is a slight rise in the ground, a subtle thickening of the earth that is easy to miss entirely, and which is the only physical evidence that something considerable once occupied this spot.

When the antiquarian George Petrie visited in 1837 and recorded his observations in his notebook, now held among the Royal Irish Academy manuscripts, the damage was already recent. The monument, catalogued as National Monument No. 153, had consisted of a boulder circle enclosing a central construction of the kind typical at Carrowmore, where a ring of large stones surrounds a small megalithic chamber. Passage tombs of this type are generally understood to have served as collective burial monuments, built during the Neolithic period, though what particular rituals accompanied their use remains a matter of interpretation. By the time Petrie arrived, only the supporting stones of the central structure survived, the capstone having been removed, along with all but three stones of the enclosing circle. Half a century later, the Victorian historian W. G. Wood-Martin recorded in 1888 that no visible trace of the monument remained above ground. The stones were not lost to time but taken, most likely for use in construction or field clearance, a fate that befell many such structures across Ireland during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

The site is referenced in Stefan Bergh's 1995 study of the Carrowmore landscape, which identifies the gentle swelling in the ground as the last legible sign of the monument's presence. For anyone walking the cemetery today, it is worth knowing that not every monument here is marked or interpreted, and that the ground itself, in places, is the monument.

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