Megalithic tomb, Ballyryan, Co. Clare

Co. Clare |

Megalithic Tombs

Megalithic tomb, Ballyryan, Co. Clare

Most of what remains at Ballyryan sits so close to the ground that it is easy to mistake the whole thing for a scatter of field stones.

Only when you read the landscape carefully does it resolve into something deliberate: a megalithic cist tomb, the kind of rectangular stone-lined burial chamber that prehistoric communities across Ireland constructed to hold their dead, now so eroded and partially robbed that its walls barely clear the turf. A low cairn, the rubble mound that once covered the chamber, is still faintly visible beneath the sod, extending roughly two and a half metres to either side of the central cist.

The chamber itself is oriented east to west and measures just under four metres in length by under two metres in width internally. On the southern side, three large stones survive, two of them leaning inwards; on the northern side, four stones of varying size remain, with conspicuous gaps where material appears to have been removed at some point. At the western end, a narrow opening framed by two stones may represent the original entrance, though the evidence is inconclusive. The interior sits slightly lower than the surrounding ground, and an area dug out at the south-east corner has exposed a modest internal height of around sixty centimetres for the easternmost stone on that side. Two further stones lie inside the chamber, aligned east to west towards its centre. The whole structure occupies a hollow in gently rolling terrain, with a low cliff face of around ten metres rising to the north-east. A named limestone erratic, recorded on Robinson's 1977 map as Cloch Bharr an Choinín, sits roughly fifty-five metres to the north-north-west. About sixty metres to the south-east lies a fulacht fia, a type of prehistoric cooking site typically identified by a horseshoe-shaped mound of fire-cracked stone and charcoal, suggesting this corner of County Clare saw sustained activity across a long stretch of prehistory.

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