Megalithic tomb - court tomb, Annagh More, Co. Mayo

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Megalithic Tombs

Megalithic tomb – court tomb, Annagh More, Co. Mayo

In the townland of Annagh More in County Mayo, a court tomb stands in the landscape, its stones arranged in a configuration that has outlasted every human institution that has since tried to record it.

Court tombs are among the oldest megalithic monuments in Ireland, built during the Neolithic period, roughly four to six thousand years ago. They take their name from a defining feature: an open, semicircular forecourt of upright stones at one end, which leads into one or more roofed gallery chambers. These were not simple burial pits but structured ritual spaces, places where communities returned repeatedly to deposit the remains of the dead and, presumably, to mark that act with ceremony.

Court tombs cluster heavily in the northern half of Ireland, and Mayo has a notable concentration of them scattered across its boglands and hillsides. The precise details of this particular example at Annagh More, including its dimensions, condition, and any excavation history, are not currently available in the public record. What can be said with confidence is that its presence in this townland places it within a broader Neolithic tradition that saw farming communities reshaping the western Irish landscape with considerable effort and intention, quarrying, dragging, and raising stones that weighed many tonnes, all without metal tools or wheeled transport. The monument's survival, however fragmentary it may now be, is a function of geography as much as anything else: Mayo's marginal lands were never intensively cleared or built over in the way that lowland agricultural areas were.

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