Megalithic tomb - wedge tomb, Barnagowlane, Co. Cork
Co. Cork |
Megalithic Tombs
A single roofstone covers what remains of a prehistoric burial monument at Barnagowlane, sitting on a low rise in the valley bottom roughly a hundred metres south of the Mealagh river.
The structure is a wedge tomb, a type of megalithic grave built by farming communities in Ireland during the late Neolithic and early Bronze Age, typically characterised by a gallery that narrows and lowers from one end to the other. Here, the wider western end measures 1.2 metres across, tapering to 0.8 metres at the east, with the whole gallery stretching 2.8 metres in length and opening towards the south-west. Two upright orthostats, the large slabs that form the walls, remain in place alongside a fallen sidestone to the north and a backstone closing off the eastern end. Three outer-wall stones are also visible at that eastern end, hinting at the more elaborate double-walled structure the monument once had, and traces of the earthen mound that would originally have enclosed much of the stonework still survive to the north and west.
The tomb was recorded and measured by Ó Nualláin in 1989, whose catalogue of Irish wedge tombs remains a key reference for monuments of this type. By the late 1990s, however, the site's condition had become a concern. Writing in 1998, Myler noted that the surrounding area had been planted with commercial forestry and that new drainage channels had been cut to within a couple of yards of the tomb itself. The stones appeared undamaged at that point, but the monument had become heavily overgrown, swallowed into the expanding plantation. It is a situation familiar to many low-lying megalithic sites across Munster, where forestry activity and shifting land use have quietly pressed in around monuments that predate written history by several thousand years.