Megalithic structure, Moanmore, Co. Galway
Co. Galway |
Megalithic Tombs
In the low ground near Moanmore, surrounded by gentle hillocks, five limestone slabs lie in a jumble that has been puzzling observers for nearly two centuries.
None of the slabs, measuring roughly two metres across and half a metre high, appear to sit in their original positions. Faint traces of a possible mound linger around them, and a carved stone trough rests alongside, as if placed there deliberately. Whether the whole arrangement is genuinely ancient or something rather more recent and contrived is a question that has never been satisfactorily resolved.
In 1837, the topographer Samuel Lewis recorded what he called the "vestiges of a circular intrenchment within which are the remains of an ancient cromlech", a cromlech being a portal tomb or dolmen, typically a large capstone balanced on upright supports. The circular earthwork he described has since vanished entirely from the surface, and the stones themselves, if they do represent a prehistoric burial chamber, appear to have collapsed and shifted so thoroughly that their original arrangement is lost. Scholars have suggested the slabs could be the remains of a chamber once aligned roughly east to west, which would be consistent with megalithic tomb traditions in the west of Ireland. But there is a complicating factor. The site sits within the former demesne of Masonbrook House, a landed estate whose outbuildings once stood immediately to the south-east. The proximity to a Georgian or post-Georgian mansion raises the possibility that what looks like a ruined megalith is in fact a folly, a deliberately constructed fake antiquity of the sort that wealthy landowners occasionally commissioned to lend their grounds an air of ancient romance. The carved stone trough beside the slabs fits awkwardly with either interpretation.
The site remains genuinely unresolved, which is part of what makes it interesting. It occupies that uncomfortable space where archaeology and landscape history overlap without producing a clean answer, a collapsed tomb that might not be a tomb, inside an enclosure that has disappeared, on an estate that no longer functions as one.