Megalithic tomb - wedge tomb, Carrigdangan, Co. Cork

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Megalithic Tombs

Megalithic tomb – wedge tomb, Carrigdangan, Co. Cork

At Carrigdangan in County Cork, there is a megalithic tomb that no longer exists, and yet we know a surprising amount about it.

Destroyed before 1896, this wedge tomb, a type of prehistoric burial monument consisting of a roofed stone gallery that typically narrows toward one end, survives only in early accounts and sketches. Those records describe a gallery aligned east to west, covered by two roofstones, with two additional stones projecting from the western end that may have formed a short portico, a kind of entrance porch. That degree of structural detail, drawn from sources made before the monument vanished entirely, gives the site an odd afterlife as something known mainly through its own absence.

The tomb's disappearance is only part of what makes Carrigdangan curious. When the Ordnance Survey produced its six-inch map in 1902, the place-name associated with the site, Bealick, had been shifted approximately fifty metres to the north. The mapmakers appear to have assumed the name belonged to a nearby rocky outcrop rather than to the tomb itself. Ruaidhrí de Valera and Seán Ó Nualláin, whose 1982 survey of the megalithic tombs of Ireland remains a foundational reference for this region, noted the discrepancy and identified the likely cause. It is a small cartographic error, but one that quietly displaced the memory of the monument on the very document that might otherwise have preserved it.

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