Megalithic structure, Cill Buaine, Co. Kerry

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Megalithic Tombs

Megalithic structure, Cill Buaine, Co. Kerry

On the lower southern slopes of Kilkeaveragh mountain, overlooking St Finan's Bay in County Kerry, a modest arrangement of stone has been carrying a considerable reputation for a very long time.

Two upright slabs, set just over a metre apart, support a large capping boulder, the whole structure low and compact against the hillside. Locally, it is known as a giant's grave, or a warrior's grave, depending on who you ask.

The structure itself is small by the standards of grand megalithic monuments. The capstone measures roughly one metre by three-quarters of a metre, and is only about a quarter of a metre thick; the two supporting orthostat slabs are similarly modest. A number of other slabs lie flat on the ground nearby, their original arrangement or purpose unclear. What this structure actually is, in formal archaeological terms, is not straightforwardly settled. The form, two uprights capped by a single boulder, is consistent with a portal tomb or a remnant of a larger megalithic monument, though the surviving dimensions are too slight to say with certainty. Megalithic tombs of various kinds were built across Ireland during the Neolithic and into the early Bronze Age, generally as collective burial monuments, and many survive only in partial or heavily disturbed states. The local folk memory of a giant or a warrior, common across Irish megalithic sites, tends to attach itself to structures that have long outlasted any documentary or oral record of their original builders or purpose. It is a way of accounting for something ancient and unexplained that sits, quietly insistent, in an otherwise ordinary landscape.

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