Megalithic tomb - court tomb, Moorneen, Co. Galway

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Megalithic Tombs

Megalithic tomb – court tomb, Moorneen, Co. Galway

On a north-west-facing slope above Cleggan Bay in Connemara, a megalithic tomb sits in a state of considerable ruin, its stones scattered and its chambers partly exposed to the sky.

What survives is enough to read the original intention: a gallery roughly seven metres long, oriented north-west to south-east, divided into two chambers by a tall septal slab, the upright stone that once separated the burial spaces, flanked by a jamb stone on either side. Several roofstones have slipped from their positions and now lie along the length of the gallery. The northern chamber appears to have been dug out at some point, whether by antiquarians, treasure-seekers, or simple agricultural necessity is not recorded.

The tomb belongs, with reasonable confidence, to the court-tomb class, one of Ireland's oldest monument types, typically dating to the Neolithic period and characterised by a roofed gallery divided into discrete burial chambers. The identification here rests partly on the structural parallel with a similar tomb at nearby Cleggan, where the same form of internal segmentation occurs. The site was noted by Kinahan in 1871, suggesting it was already recognised as a monument of significance in the mid-Victorian era, even in its damaged condition. Adding further depth to the landscape around it, pre-bog field walls survive to the south and east, the low, half-buried remnants of farming boundaries that predate the formation of the blanket bog itself, meaning this slope was once open, worked ground long before the peat accumulated over it.

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