Megalithic tomb, Illaun, Co. Clare
Co. Clare |
Megalithic Tombs
County Clare has an extraordinary concentration of megalithic tombs, the ancient stone burial monuments built by Neolithic communities roughly five thousand years ago, and the townland of Illaun holds one such structure that has drawn the attention of serious field researchers.
These tombs, which come in several forms including court tombs, portal tombs, and wedge tombs, were not simply graves but focal points for communities, places where the dead were interred and, likely, where the living gathered for ritual. Clare's limestone landscape preserves them with unusual clarity.
The principal scholarly record for this tomb comes from the fieldwork of Ruaidhrí de Valera and Seán Ó Nualláin, whose Survey of the Megalithic Tombs of Ireland, Volume I, covering County Clare, was published by the Stationery Office in Dublin in 1961. De Valera in particular devoted much of his career to cataloguing and classifying these monuments across the country, and the Clare volume remains a foundational reference for anyone studying the Neolithic of the west of Ireland. The survey methodology involved careful on-the-ground inspection, measurement, and description of each structure, making it a resource that field archaeologists still consult.