Megalithic tomb, Creevy, Co. Mayo

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Megalithic Tombs

Megalithic tomb, Creevy, Co. Mayo

In the level pasture at Creevy in County Mayo, a low oblong mound sits quietly in a field, its four large boulders arranged around its perimeter in a configuration that suggests considerable age, though the structure was considered unremarkable enough to be left off the Ordnance Survey maps of both 1838 and 1922.

That omission is itself telling. Megalithic tombs, the collective term for a range of prehistoric funerary monuments built from large stones, were being recorded across Ireland for well over a century before this one was formally noted, yet this particular example slipped through.

The mound measures roughly six metres east to west and four metres north to south, rising to about a metre in height. At its eastern end, a single large upright boulder extends almost the full width of that shorter face, while two further uprights stand against the southern and northern flanks respectively, broadly parallel to one another. A fourth stone lies flat across the sloping western edge. The whole thing is irregular in shape, narrowing slightly towards the east, with an uneven, undulating surface. Hawthorn and ash have taken root along the northern edge near the western end. Complicating any straightforward reading of the site is the fact that farmers over the years appear to have used the mound as a convenient place to deposit stones cleared from surrounding fields, and that accumulated material now obscures whether the core beneath is primarily earth or stone, and whether those perimeter boulders were ever properly set into the ground or simply pushed up against the mound's sides. Lough Agawna lies about 120 metres to the south-east, visible on those same nineteenth and early twentieth century maps that never acknowledged the mound at all.

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