Megalithic tomb - passage tomb, Carrowreagh, Co. Mayo

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Megalithic Tombs

Megalithic tomb – passage tomb, Carrowreagh, Co. Mayo

In a low-lying field in County Mayo, close to where a nameless stream meets the Fiddaun River, a flattened mound sits in ordinary pasture with nothing to announce it.

It is the kind of place you could walk past without registering, yet what lies on top of it is a passage tomb, a Neolithic burial monument in which the dead were interred within a stone chamber reached by a narrow stone-lined corridor. The mound itself is roughly 30 to 35 metres across and rises about 1.7 metres on its southern side, enough to give it a faint but deliberate presence in otherwise level ground. The Ox Mountains trace the skyline to the south-east, offering a frame but not the dramatic elevated setting that many comparable tombs command.

On the summit of the mound, set a few metres in from its edge, a circle of large boulders some 16 metres in diameter sits in varying states of preservation. The south-western arc remains the most coherent, with close-set stones standing between 0.8 and 1.1 metres high; elsewhere the circuit is broken by gaps, most noticeably to the north and south-east. Near the centre of the circle, larger stones protrude from a slight hollow, likely the remains of the burial chamber. A pair of smaller matched stones, each about 0.7 metres long and set roughly 0.8 metres apart, stands just to the east of the chamber; these are thought to be what survives of the passage itself, oriented east to west. The tomb was recorded by the archaeologist Michael Herity in 1974, who described a ring of boulders 21 metres in diameter with a boulder-built chamber at its centre. A later inspection in 1995 found the overall layout broadly consistent with his account, though a dense growth of gorse and brambles made a thorough examination difficult and left some details uncertain. Notably, the site does not appear on the Ordnance Survey six-inch mapping of 1837 to 1838, though it is marked on the 1922 edition, suggesting it either escaped the earlier surveyors' notice or was not sufficiently visible at that time.

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