Megalithic tomb - passage tomb, Banagher, Co. Cavan
Co. Cavan |
Megalithic Tombs
On a patch of uneven elevated pasture in County Cavan, overlooked from the north-west by the slopes of Slieve Glah, a ruined passage tomb sits inside a stone circle roughly forty metres across.
That combination, a cairn enclosed within a ring of standing stones, is unusual in itself, and this particular site is just one component of a broader complex of burial and ritual monuments occupying an area of roughly 150 metres by 130 metres. Several of the circle's twelve stones still stand upright, reaching between 0.65 and 1.3 metres high; the rest have fallen. The grass-grown cairn at the centre is about 22 metres in diameter now, though surviving kerbstones suggest the original structured mound was closer to 15 metres across. Among the set stones near the east side of the cairn, at least one prostrate stone carries passage tomb art, the abstract carved motifs, spirals, lozenges, and cup marks, associated with Ireland's megalithic tradition.
In 1972, Raftery excavated the monument on behalf of the National Museum of Ireland, opening an irregular area of around ten square metres to a depth of 0.8 metres. Inside the mound, which proved to be composed of dark earth and small stones, three cavities were identified close to the centre. These were presumed to be cists, small stone-lined graves typically inserted into older mounds, and the evidence suggests they were secondary additions to a cairn that already existed. Two of the cavities each contained a ceramic vessel but disintegrated on discovery. The third yielded a complete bipartite bowl, a form with two distinct zones of profile, measuring just over eleven centimetres high and fifteen centimetres in diameter at its widest. That vessel, now catalogued by the National Museum, has been tentatively dated to between 1980 and 1930 or 1920 BC, placing it in the Early Bronze Age. Notably, no human remains were found anywhere in the excavated area, leaving the precise function of the cists, and of the bowl in particular, unresolved.