Megalithic tomb - passage tomb, Bremore, Co. Dublin

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Megalithic Tombs

Megalithic tomb – passage tomb, Bremore, Co. Dublin

Somewhere on the north Dublin coast, a prehistoric burial mound was quietly dismantled in the 1940s so that Ireland could declare its neutrality to passing aircraft.

The largest of five mounds at Bremore, this passage tomb sits at the mouth of the River Delvin, and family memory holds that it was perfectly conical until the Board of Works removed stone from it to spell out "Eire" in white lettering along the cliff edge of the headland, a practice used across the country during the Emergency to signal to overflying planes that this was neutral territory. The interior of the mound is thought to have collapsed as a result. It is a peculiar footnote to twentieth-century history that a monument several thousand years old may have been significantly altered by the geopolitics of the Second World War.

The mound is the best-preserved of the Bremore cemetery group, recorded by Rynne in 1960 and examined in more detail by Herity in 1974. A passage tomb is a type of megalithic monument in which a stone-lined corridor leads to one or more burial chambers, the whole structure covered by a cairn of earth and rubble. At Bremore, the cairn is heavily grassed over and measures up to 29 metres in diameter and 3.5 metres in height. Possible kerbstones, the boulders that once defined the edge of the cairn, are still visible on the western side, and a disturbance at the north-west may represent the remains of a collapsed passage and chamber. Cartographic evidence suggests the mound may have suffered quarrying or collapse even before the 1940s, complicating the family account somewhat. A geophysical survey carried out in 2006 under licence produced no clear structural detail from beneath the surface, though it did reveal a drainage pipe inserted immediately to the east. The headland was also assessed as part of a constraint study ahead of a proposed port development, and the site has been protected by a preservation order since 1976.

The tomb sits on Bremore headland at the coast, which gives the location a certain exposure, particularly in unsettled weather. The grassed-over mound is visually unassuming from a distance, so it rewards a closer approach; the scale becomes clearer when you are standing beside it. The possible kerbstones on the western face are worth looking for. As with many coastal monuments in Ireland, the setting does a good deal of the interpretive work, the land dropping away to the sea and the mouth of the Delvin below, making the choice of this particular promontory feel less arbitrary than it might otherwise seem.

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