Megalithic structure, Coolinarrig, Co. Wicklow

Co. Wicklow |

Megalithic Tombs

Megalithic structure, Coolinarrig, Co. Wicklow

On the north-eastern slopes of Baltinglass Hill in County Wicklow, a megalithic chamber sits on a level, rounded platform that projects out from the hillside and looks across a wide sweep of upland country.

The capstone is formed by a single inverted L-shaped boulder resting on several uprights, and what remains of the cairn around it, the mound of stones that would originally have enclosed the whole structure, is now largely gone. The entrance faces north-east, and on a clear day the views from that opening take in Spinans Hill to the north and Brusselstown, Kilranelagh Hill, and Keadeen Mountain to the east.

A megalithic tomb of this kind, a stone-built burial chamber covered by a cairn, would typically date to the Neolithic period, several thousand years before the common era. The cairn here appears to have been systematically dismantled, and the landowner's understanding is that the stone was robbed out for practical purposes, used in the construction of field walls and a drainage channel that now runs roughly north-west to south-east immediately to the west of the structure. That kind of quiet, incremental removal of ancient stonework was common in farming landscapes across Ireland, where dressed or manageable boulders were simply too useful to leave undisturbed. Around the chamber, a possible ring of kerbstones is still visible at ground level; kerbstones are the upright or flat stones placed around the base of a cairn to define and retain it. There is also a rectangular arrangement of stones to the rear, to the west, which may represent either a second chamber or what was once a longer single chamber before significant alteration.

The site sits roughly 230 metres to the east of Rathcoran hillfort, an Iron Age enclosure that occupies the summit of Baltinglass Hill itself, which means the two monuments, separated by several millennia in origin, share the same ridge. The proximity is coincidental in terms of construction but characteristic of Irish upland landscapes, where later communities often settled close to, or made use of, ground already marked by earlier ones.

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