Megalithic tomb, Kilcurrish, Co. Clare
Co. Clare |
Megalithic Tombs
In the townland of Kilcurrish, County Clare, a megalithic tomb sits as part of a landscape that was already ancient when the earliest Irish annals were being written.
Megalithic tombs are collective burial monuments built from large stones, typically during the Neolithic period, and County Clare contains a remarkable concentration of them, ranging from the grand court tombs of the north to the wedge tombs that proliferate across the Burren and its surrounds. The Kilcurrish example belongs to this broader pattern of prehistoric monument-building that shaped the Clare countryside long before any written record.
The primary scholarly source for this site is the survey conducted by Ruaidhrí de Valera and Seán Ó Nualláin, published in 1961 as the first volume of their Survey of the Megalithic Tombs of Ireland, which focused specifically on County Clare. De Valera and Ó Nualláin systematically catalogued the county's megalithic remains at a time when many such sites were poorly documented, and their work remains a foundational reference for Irish prehistoric archaeology. The Kilcurrish tomb was recorded as part of that effort, placing it within a county-wide picture of Neolithic and early Bronze Age funerary practice. Beyond what their survey captured, the specific dimensions, orientation, and condition of the structure at Kilcurrish are not detailed here, which is itself a reminder of how many Irish megalithic sites exist in a state of partial knowledge, noted and classified but not yet fully studied or widely known.