Megalithic tomb - wedge tomb, Canrooska, Co. Cork

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Megalithic Tombs

Megalithic tomb – wedge tomb, Canrooska, Co. Cork

On the upper slopes of Barraboy Mountain in West Cork, a prehistoric burial chamber sits half-swallowed by blanket bog, its roofstones tilted and its walls largely sealed in peat, looking out across Glengarriff Harbour and Bantry Bay in a view that has changed rather less than the monument itself.

This is a wedge tomb, a type of megalithic structure built predominantly during the late Neolithic and early Bronze Age, characterised by a tapering gallery, wider and taller at the entrance end and narrowing towards the back, with the whole typically aligned to face the setting sun in the west. That architectural logic is still readable here despite the encroaching bog.

The gallery runs NE-SW and measures 3.2 metres in length, narrowing from around 1.25 metres wide at the western entrance to roughly 0.75 metres at the eastern end. The chamber is closed at the east by a backstone and at the west by a substantial septal-stone, a dividing slab set into the gallery walls, fronted by a portico of upright orthostats with two further jamb-like stones set inside them. Two large roofstones, partially displaced, still cover much of the gallery; the western slab measures roughly 2.2 by 1.45 metres and the eastern one approximately 1.8 by 2.3 metres. An inclined slab protruding from the peat just west of the portico may have formed some additional element of closure, though its precise function is uncertain. This tomb sits on a gently sloping terrace at the head of the Canrooska River valley, and it is the more southerly of two wedge tombs in close proximity on the mountain, its companion monument lying just 20 metres to the north, a pairing that is relatively unusual and hints at a landscape that once held some concentrated ceremonial or funerary significance.

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