Megalithic tomb - wedge tomb, Baile An Teampaill, Co. Kerry
Co. Kerry |
Megalithic Tombs
Most of this prehistoric tomb is invisible.
The bog at Baile An Teampaill, on the Dingle Peninsula in County Kerry, has crept up around it over the millennia, swallowing the structure until only fragments break the surface. What remains visible amounts to a handful of standing and tilted stones, the ghost of an outline, and, at the northeastern end of the gallery, the barely perceptible edge of a roofstone almost entirely consumed by peat.
The monument is a wedge tomb, a type of megalithic burial structure built in Ireland during the late Neolithic and early Bronze Age, typically characterised by a gallery that is wider and higher at its western end and tapers toward the east. This example follows that convention precisely: the gallery runs WSW to ENE, is 1.2 metres wide at its western end, and extends roughly 4 metres in length. Four sidestones survive on the northern side; on the south, a single stone pitched inward is all that remains. Two outer-wall stones are exposed to the north, and a solitary stone to the southeast may mark the eastern limit of the outer walling. The tomb sits within a web of old field boundaries, two of which converge on the site from the southwest and southeast, suggesting that later agricultural generations incorporated this ancient feature into their own landscape management without much ceremony, or perhaps without fully understanding what lay beneath the ground beside their walls. The structural details were recorded by J. Cuppage as part of the Dingle Peninsula archaeological survey published in 1986.
The encroaching bog makes this a site where patience and a careful eye are rewarded. The stones that do protrude are subtle, easily mistaken for field clearance rubble, and the old fence lines running toward the tomb serve as useful orientation markers in what is otherwise an open and undifferentiated stretch of boggy ground.