Megalithic tomb, Ballydonohoe, Co. Kerry
Co. Kerry |
Megalithic Tombs
In the north Kerry landscape near Ballydonohoe, a prehistoric burial monument survives in a form so reduced that only its name hints at what it once was.
Marked on Ordnance Survey maps from the 1841 to 1842 survey, and again on the 1939 edition, as the "Giant's Grave", the site belongs to a long tradition of Irish folk nomenclature that attached such names to megalithic tombs, those ancient stone-built burial structures raised by Neolithic or Bronze Age communities, whose true origins had long been forgotten by the people who later farmed around them.
At some point roughly seven or eight years before the site was formally recorded in the 1995 North Kerry Archaeological Survey, the structure was levelled. What had presumably stood as a visible megalithic tomb, perhaps with upright stones or a capstone, was reduced to a low oval mound measuring approximately 11.9 metres north to south and 13 metres east to west. That mound is essentially all that remains. The tomb sits to the north-east of a univallate rath, a single-ditched circular earthwork enclosure of the early medieval period, which continues to survive nearby. The proximity of monuments from different periods is not unusual in the Irish countryside, where prehistoric and early medieval features often cluster in the same agricultural landscape, each generation finding meaning or practicality in ground already marked by those before them.
The loss here is quiet but real. A site that appeared on maps for nearly a century, carrying a name that preserved some folk memory of its strangeness, was gone before it could be properly excavated or documented beyond its outline dimensions. The mound itself offers little to the casual eye, but its oval footprint, sitting in relation to the nearby rath, at least preserves the general arrangement of a place where people were once buried, and where later communities left their own mark on the land.