Megalithic structure, Glensleade, Co. Clare

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Megalithic Tombs

Megalithic structure, Glensleade, Co. Clare

In the townland of Glensleade, in County Clare, there stands a megalithic structure old enough that the people who raised it left no written account of why they did so.

That is not unusual for megalithic monuments, which predate literacy in Ireland by several thousand years, but it does mean that almost everything we might want to know about this particular structure, its form, its orientation, its relationship to the surrounding landscape, remains tantalizingly unrecorded in any publicly accessible source.

Clare is not short of prehistoric monuments. The county's most celebrated concentration sits on the limestone plateau of the Burren to the north, where portal tombs, wedge tombs, and other megalithic structures survive in considerable numbers, largely because the thin soil and exposed rock made later agriculture difficult and left ancient features undisturbed. A wedge tomb, to use one common Clare type as an example, is a gallery grave built from large upright stones and roofed with capstones, typically wider and taller at the entrance end and tapering toward the back, and usually dating to the late Neolithic or early Bronze Age, roughly 2500 to 2000 BC. Whether the Glensleade structure belongs to this tradition or to another is not currently established in any detail that can be confirmed here.

Glensleade itself is a quiet rural townland, and the monument's precise condition and accessibility are not documented in any source available at the time of writing. It sits, for now, as a placeholder in the landscape, known to exist, not yet fully described.

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Pete F
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