Megalithic tomb - court tomb, Grange (Smallcounty By.), Co. Limerick
Co. Limerick |
Megalithic Tombs
A low oval of stones in a field beside the Limerick to Cork road has been called, at different times and by different authorities, a stone avenue, a stone circle, and possibly a court tomb, which is a type of Neolithic chambered monument typically featuring an open forecourt flanked by upright stones leading into a burial gallery.
That uncertainty is not a failure of scholarship so much as an honest reflection of how thoroughly the site has been altered. The stones that remain, a scattering of orthostats forming a rough shape roughly 18 metres by 7 metres, are low and partly buried, and the larger structure they once belonged to has been almost entirely removed.
The Lough Gur landscape in County Limerick is one of the most densely packed prehistoric zones in Ireland, and this site sits at its busiest edge, about 550 metres west of the lake. When Professor Harkness visited in 1869 he noted a double row of large blocks near the Limerick high-road and a wide cup-shaped depression nearby, uncertain whether that hollow was natural or man-made. By 1895, a writer named Lynch recorded that the adjoining embanked stone circle had been entirely stripped of its stones, the last removed roughly sixty years before his visit, and that the avenue leading to it retained only thirteen stones, irregularly placed and some shifted from their original positions. The Ordnance Survey mapped the feature twice with different labels: the 1927 revised six-inch edition called it a Stone Avenue, while the 25-inch map recorded it as a Stone Circle with eleven orthostats visible. The current interpretation as a possible court tomb rests on its characteristic siting rather than any preserved structural evidence, a reading proposed by Cleary in 2015 drawing on earlier work by Cooney and Grogan.
The site lies in grassland immediately west of the main road, with the better-known Grange embanked stone circle about 150 metres to the south-south-east. Visitors who come specifically for Grange will find this monument easily enough by continuing a short distance along the field boundary, though there is little to orient around at ground level. Aerial photographs reveal the oval outline more clearly than any visit on foot is likely to, given how low the surviving orthostats sit. The surrounding monuments, including two stone circles to the east, a roadway historically recorded as Cladh na Leac, and the remains of Grange Castle to the west, give some sense of how crowded this corridor once was with prehistoric and early medieval activity.