Megalithic tomb, Coollicka, Co. Cork

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Megalithic Tombs

Megalithic tomb, Coollicka, Co. Cork

A large flat stone, roughly two and a half metres across, sits piled atop a field boundary in Coollicka, Co. Cork, not arranged in the ground as its builders intended but stacked there by later hands clearing the land.

The tomb it once covered has been dismantled, its surrounding field fences removed, and what remains is an assemblage of displaced stones rather than a monument in any conventional sense. What makes it quietly arresting is that the capstone and several orthostats, the upright stones that would originally have formed the chamber walls, have simply been shunted to the nearest available surface, as though the people clearing the field were reluctant to cart them further.

The site occupies a level patch of ground with an open view southward along the Dripsey River valley, a position that suggests deliberate placement by whoever built it, probably during the Neolithic or early Bronze Age. When the archaeologists Ruaidhrí de Valera and Seán Ó Nualláin surveyed it in 1982, they recorded a ruined chamber covered by a single roofstone measuring 2.4 metres by 2.2 metres and roughly 0.3 metres thick, supported by two surviving orthostats to the west and southeast, with the northern end resting directly on the ground. Several other stones stood nearby, their original positions within the structure no longer clear. Ó Nualláin classed the tomb as unclassified, meaning it did not fit neatly into the recognised categories of Irish megalithic architecture, such as portal tomb, court tomb, or wedge tomb, and noted that it might instead be a large cist, a stone-lined burial box typically associated with individual interments rather than the communal burial chambers more commonly found in the megalithic tradition. That ambiguity has never been resolved.

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