Megalithic tomb, Coolmurly, Co. Sligo

Co. Sligo |

Megalithic Tombs

Megalithic tomb, Coolmurly, Co. Sligo

Some ancient monuments survive as ruins; others survive only as drawings.

At Coolmurly in County Sligo, a megalithic tomb of uncertain type is known primarily through a plan made in the late nineteenth century, because the structure itself no longer exists. Ordnance Survey documents recorded upright stones still standing at the site around 1914, but by 1952 they had been removed entirely, leaving nothing visible on the ground.

What we know of the monument comes largely from the antiquarian W. G. Wood-Martin, who recorded and published a plan of it in 1883 to 1884 and again in 1888. His plan shows an oval gallery roughly seven metres long and up to three metres wide, apparently opening to the north, a feature that already sets it apart from the more familiar orientation patterns of megalithic architecture. More intriguing still, Wood-Martin noted in his written account that the monument terminated in two stone circles, though he never included these on the plan itself, leaving their form and extent a matter of record without illustration. The tomb stood approximately ten metres north of a court tomb, a type of Neolithic monument typically consisting of an unroofed ceremonial forecourt leading into a roofed burial gallery. A wedge tomb, another distinct Neolithic and early Bronze Age monument form, lies around 150 metres to the south-south-west, suggesting that this corner of Sligo once held a cluster of funerary structures of different periods or traditions. Seán Ó Nualláin, who catalogued the megalithic tombs of County Sligo in a 1989 survey, documented this site but was unable to classify the destroyed monument with confidence, noting it under a general listing rather than assigning it firmly to any recognised tomb type.

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