Megalithic structure (present location), St. James, Co. Dublin

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Megalithic Tombs

Megalithic structure (present location), St. James, Co. Dublin

Somewhere between the lion enclosures and the penguin pools of Dublin Zoo, there is a megalithic tomb.

It sits within the grounds of the Zoological Gardens in the Phoenix Park, an ancient funerary monument now surrounded by the infrastructure of a working zoo, which is not where it began its existence and almost certainly not where whoever built it intended it to end up.

The structure was originally uncovered in a sandpit close to Chapelizod, not far from Knockmary in the Phoenix Park, during the nineteenth century. Megalithic tombs of this kind, the broad category covering portal tombs, passage tombs, and wedge tombs among others, were built during the Neolithic period as collective or individual burial monuments, often carefully placed in the landscape with ceremonial intention. This one yielded a human skeleton when it was excavated, a detail recorded by Borlase in 1897 and by Poe in 1904, which confirms it functioned as an actual burial site rather than simply a field monument. At some point after its discovery, rather than being left in situ, the structure was relocated to its current position within the zoo grounds, a fate that was not entirely unusual in the nineteenth century, when antiquities were sometimes moved for reasons of convenience, curiosity, or display.

The tomb is accessible to anyone with a ticket to Dublin Zoo, which makes it one of the more straightforward megalithic sites to reach in the greater Dublin area, if also one of the more surreal. Visitors looking for it should be aware that it is not prominently signposted as a heritage feature; it occupies its corner of the gardens without much ceremony. The stones themselves repay close attention. Looking at the arrangement of the structural uprights and any surviving capstone gives a sense of the original chamber that once enclosed the burial, even if the wider landscape context that would have given the monument its original meaning has long since dissolved into parkland and zoo infrastructure.

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