Megalithic tomb, Béal Deirg Mór, Co. Mayo
Co. Mayo |
Megalithic Tombs
On a stretch of County Mayo landscape that has never made it onto the usual circuits of megalithic tourism, the townland of Béal Deirg Mór holds the remains of a megalithic tomb, a structure built by farming communities in Ireland somewhere between four and six thousand years ago, long before the written word arrived on the island.
These monuments, raised from large undressed stones to house the dead communally, are scattered across Mayo in considerable numbers, yet many, including this one, receive little attention compared to more celebrated sites elsewhere in the west.
The principal scholarly record for this tomb comes from Ruaidhrí de Valera and Seán Ó Nualláin, whose Survey of the Megalithic Tombs of Ireland, Volume II, covering County Mayo, was published by the Stationery Office in Dublin in 1964. De Valera and Ó Nualláin spent years systematically cataloguing megalithic monuments across the country, and their Mayo volume remains a foundational reference for the county's prehistoric archaeology. The survey work brought rigorous fieldwork to sites that had often been noted only in passing, or not recorded at all, giving structures like this one in Béal Deirg Mór a permanent place in the archaeological literature.
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