Megalithic tomb - portal tomb, Raheen, Co. Kilkenny
Co. Kilkenny |
Megalithic Tombs
The roofstone alone tells much of the story.
At roughly 3.9 metres long, nearly 2 metres wide, and more than half a metre thick, it is a substantial slab of stone, and yet it has slipped from its original position, now resting at an angle against the doorstone and side slabs as though propped there by some enormous, unhurried force. This is a portal tomb, a type of megalithic burial monument typically consisting of two upright portal stones, a backstone, and a large capstone raised at the front, dating to the Neolithic period, roughly 4000 to 2500 BC. The example at Raheen in County Kilkenny is small and considerably disordered, but that disorder is part of what makes it worth attention.
The chamber itself is modest, about 1.8 metres long and 1 metre wide, oriented to face uphill in a north-easterly direction. It sits within an old copse on the eastern side of a valley that opens to the south-west. Of its original structural members, the southern portal stone has toppled outward to the east, the southern sidestone, now in two pieces, leans inward against the doorstone, and the northern sidestone has gone entirely. In its place, someone at some unknown point laid a low line of rough dry-walling to mark the edge of the chamber, a quiet improvised repair that sits oddly alongside the prehistoric stonework. The western end is sealed by two leaning slabs, one of them split. What gives a sense of the tomb's original ambition is the drop of 2 metres between the chamber floor and the underside of the capstone, a significant interior height for a structure of this footprint. No trace of a surrounding cairn or mound survives. The tomb was noted by Borlase in 1897 and again by Powell in 1941, placing it within a longer tradition of antiquarian interest in the Iverk region of south Kilkenny.