Megalithic tomb - portal tomb, Newmarket, Co. Kilkenny

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Megalithic Tombs

Megalithic tomb – portal tomb, Newmarket, Co. Kilkenny

On a north-east facing slope at Newmarket in County Kilkenny, a portal tomb has been quietly losing its shape for decades.

Portal tombs, sometimes called dolmens, are among the oldest surviving human constructions in Ireland, megalithic burial monuments typically consisting of two upright portal stones, a back stone, and a large capstone balanced across them. What makes this particular example worth noting is not its grandeur but its gradual dissolution: by the time it was properly recorded, it was already in trouble, and the situation has only worsened since.

When Ó Nualláin documented the site in 1983, the monument comprised two portal stones, the taller reaching 2.1 metres and the shorter 1.6 metres, both leaning markedly to the south-east. Their orientation suggested the chamber had originally opened uphill to the south-west, which is a relatively uncommon alignment. The roofstone, measuring roughly 2.55 metres by 2.25 metres and nearly half a metre thick, was no longer resting across the portals but had come to stand on edge, propped against the eastern portal stone. That entire eastern side of the structure had at some point been absorbed into a low field fence, the stones serving the practical purposes of a working farm rather than any archaeological consideration. Since that 1983 survey, the site has been reclaimed from the fence line, but the consequence of that intervention has been further displacement: the stones have been moved out of their recorded positions, leaving the original arrangement difficult to reconstruct with confidence.

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