Megalithic tomb - wedge tomb, Com An Tsleabhcháin, Co. Kerry
Co. Kerry |
Megalithic Tombs
On a sharply sloping hillside in Com An Tsleabhcháin, on the Iveragh Peninsula in County Kerry, a small collection of stones marks what was once a wedge tomb.
The capstone that originally covered the burial chamber has been displaced, leaving the structure open to the sky, and at least one of the upright stones has been repositioned over the centuries, shifting it from wherever it first stood. What remains is fragmentary but legible: a gallery, which is the long narrow passage at the core of a wedge tomb, defined on its north side by that single moved upright, and on its south side by two stones set at slightly different alignments, one tucked inside the line of the other. A possible buttress-stone sits just outside that southern edge, and a septal stone, a slab used to divide or close off a section of the interior, crosses the western end of the gallery.
Wedge tombs are the most numerous of Ireland's megalithic tomb types and are generally dated to the late Neolithic and early Bronze Age, roughly four to five thousand years ago. They are concentrated in the west of the country, and Kerry has a particularly dense scatter of them. This example sits within a hundred metres of another recorded monument, suggesting a landscape that was once deliberately and repeatedly marked by communities for whom the act of burial, or whatever ritual the tombs served, warranted permanent stone construction. The site was documented by Ruaidhrí de Valera and Seán Ó Nualláin in their Survey of the Megalithic Tombs of Ireland, published in 1982, which recorded Kerry's examples as part of a wider volume covering the southern counties. Their account noted the displaced capstone and the repositioned upright, details that indicate the monument had already experienced significant disturbance before any modern survey took place.