Wedge tombs are the most numerous of Ireland's megalithic tomb types, built during the late Neolithic and into the Bronze Age, roughly between 2500 and 2000 BC. Their name comes from their shape: a roofed gallery that narrows and lowers from front to back, typically oriented towards the west or south-west, in the direction of the setting sun. They were collective burial monuments, places where communities interred their dead over generations, and Clare has a notably dense concentration of them, owing in part to the county's extensive limestone and sandstone geology, which provided ready building material.