Megalithic tomb - wedge tomb, Carraig Na Muc, Co. Cork
Co. Cork |
Megalithic Tombs
There is nothing left to see at Carraig Na Muc, and that absence is itself part of the story.
A megalithic structure that once stood in open pasture in Mid Cork has been entirely removed, leaving no visible surface trace. The only record of its existence is a single appearance on the 1842 Ordnance Survey six-inch map, where the cartographers marked it, with a certain matter-of-fact grandeur, as "Giant's Grave".
When nineteenth-century OS surveyors recorded the site in their Memoranda, they described what they found with admirable plainness: two long stone flags placed parallel to each other, each roughly six feet long, three feet broad, and two feet high, with no covering stone, and an appearance suggestive of a grave. Scholars Ruairí de Valera and Seán Ó Nualláin, writing in 1982, examined that description and concluded the structure may have been either a small wedge tomb or a large cist. A wedge tomb is a type of prehistoric megalithic burial monument, typically a roofed stone chamber that narrows toward one end; a cist is a simpler stone-lined grave, sometimes covered with a capstone. The distinction matters archaeologically, but at Carraig Na Muc the question cannot now be settled. The structure sat approximately 150 metres to the east of a separate wedge tomb that still survives in the same area, which suggests this was once a landscape with at least two prehistoric monuments in relatively close proximity. At some point between the mid-nineteenth century and the present, this second structure was dismantled or displaced entirely.