Megalithic structure, Kiltanon, Co. Clare

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Megalithic Tombs

Megalithic structure, Kiltanon, Co. Clare

Along the front avenue of Kiltanon House in County Clare, tucked among hawthorns on a low mound, four stones lie in a rough east-west line that may or may not be the collapsed remains of a prehistoric dolmen.

A dolmen is a type of megalithic tomb, typically consisting of large upright stones capped by a horizontal slab, and this site has the proportions of a small one, if it is one at all. The honest answer is that nobody is entirely certain. The mound beneath the stones, roughly 4.5 metres across and less than a metre high, could as easily be a natural rock outcrop clothed in sod as the remnant of a deliberate ancient construction. That ambiguity has followed the site for well over a century.

The antiquarian Thomas Johnson Westropp visited in the early 1900s and recorded four stone blocks lying side by side, measuring between roughly two feet and four feet in their various dimensions, with a fifth slab on the western slope of the mound. He thought the arrangement probably represented a small ruined dolmen, though he noted the remains were already greatly defaced and absent from the Ordnance Survey maps of his day. They were still absent from OS mapping when the site was formally listed in the Record of Monuments and Places in 1996, giving it the cautious designation of megalithic structure rather than committing to any specific monument type. A former millrace, the channel that once directed water to power a mill, sits about 56 metres to the north-west, a reminder that this corner of Clare has been worked and modified across many different periods. What lies beneath the hawthorns, though, remains genuinely unresolved, a modest mound that carries a question rather than an answer.

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Pete F
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