Megalithic tomb - passage tomb, Knocknarea, Co. Sligo
Co. Sligo |
Megalithic Tombs
Most visitors who make the climb up Knocknarea in County Sligo come for Maeve's Cairn, the enormous unexcavated mound that dominates the summit plateau and is traditionally associated with the legendary queen of Connacht.
Far fewer notice the cluster of eight boulders sitting roughly 52 metres to its south-west, half-swallowed by heather, which appear to be the heavily degraded remains of a separate passage tomb chamber. A passage tomb is a megalithic burial monument in which a stone-lined corridor leads to an enclosed chamber, typically covered by a round cairn; here, no trace of such a cairn survives, nor is there any sign of an enclosing stone circle. What remains are the boulders themselves, averaging around 1.1 metres by 0.7 metres, with two recumbent split stones on the western side, each about half a metre high and oriented north-north-west to south-south-east, possibly forming what was once the south-western wall of the chamber.
The condition of the tomb is likely not purely the work of time. The site is believed to be among the monuments on Knocknarea disturbed in the early nineteenth century by Richard Chamber Walker, a local landowner and antiquarian. Walker's interventions on the mountain, recorded in the scholarship of Stefan Bergh, left several sites in uncertain states, their original configurations obscured by a mixture of natural decay and early amateur investigation. The tomb sits on a low north-south elevation on the summit, just 31 metres south-west of another possible passage tomb, making this a corner of the hilltop that once held a concentration of prehistoric monuments, most of them now fragmentary and easy to overlook.