Megalithic tomb, Graniera, Co. Tipperary

Co. Tipperary |

Megalithic Tombs

Megalithic tomb, Graniera, Co. Tipperary

On an east-facing slope in Graniera, County Tipperary, two old stones sit in a field in a state of studied ambiguity.

One of them, an orthostat, stands about 1.2 metres high and is aligned roughly northeast to southwest. The second leans against the southerly face of the first, its original position uncertain enough that archaeologists have declined to confirm whether it ever stood upright on this particular spot or simply came to rest here over centuries of slow disturbance. Around them, faint traces of a mound survive in the surrounding ground. Taken together, the stones may be the last visible remnants of a megalithic tomb, the kind of prehistoric monument, typically several thousand years old, in which large upright stones once formed the skeletal framework of a burial chamber covered by earth or cairn.

The tentative identification was recorded by De Valera and Ó Nualláin in 1982, in their systematic catalogue of megalithic monuments across Ireland. The conditional language they used, "might be the remnants", reflects a genuine interpretive difficulty. Megalithic tombs survive in wildly varying states of preservation, and two stones with a trace of a mound can represent either a substantially collapsed structure or simply a coincidence of geology and farming history. Without excavation, it is difficult to say with confidence which applies at Graniera. What the site offers, then, is less a monument than a question posed in stone on a quiet Tipperary hillside.

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