Megalithic structure, Lathaleere, Co. Wicklow

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Megalithic Tombs

Megalithic structure, Lathaleere, Co. Wicklow

There is something quietly melancholy about a prehistoric monument that was recorded in enough detail to be protected by law, and then destroyed anyway.

At Lathaleere in County Wicklow, a megalithic structure once occupied the south-western end of a level ridge with long views down towards the River Slaney. It is gone now, or very nearly, and what may remain of it sits displaced beside a field boundary, waiting for no particular purpose.

When Liam Price documented the site in 1934, he found an oblong mound measuring roughly 6.1 metres by 4 metres and only about 0.6 metres high, with a granite boulder anchoring each end. Near the south-western edge, roughly at the centre of the mound, a large prostrate slab, almost 1.9 metres long, lay beside a small upright stone. The arrangement was modest in scale but clearly deliberate, the kind of low, elongated megalithic form that tends to attract interpretations ranging from burial monument to territorial marker, though the precise function here was never firmly established. The monument had been placed on a commanding position above the Slaney, which suggests it was intended to be seen, or to see from, in a way that mattered to whoever raised it. Sometime around 1979 or 1980, it was destroyed. A preservation order, made as far back as 1940, had offered it no real protection in the end. About 40 metres to the south-east of the original site, a group of large boulders and a slab measuring 2.67 metres long and just over 2 metres wide lies near the field boundary, and this scatter may represent the dismantled remnants, moved and dumped rather than simply broken apart.

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