Megalithic tomb - wedge tomb, Com An Tsleabhcháin, Co. Kerry
Co. Kerry |
Megalithic Tombs
A small prehistoric burial chamber sits barely 350 metres from the Kerry coastline, tucked into a sheltered hollow beside a stream on the Iveragh Peninsula.
What makes it quietly arresting is its compactness: the internal chamber measures just 1.21 metres in length, yet several of its structural elements remain largely intact after several thousand years of Atlantic weather. A single roof-stone still covers the chamber, and a septal-stone, a slab used to divide or close off a section of the tomb's interior, seals its western end.
Wedge tombs are the most numerous of Ireland's megalithic tomb types, built predominantly during the late Neolithic and into the Bronze Age, roughly between 2500 and 2000 BC. They take their name from the characteristic way the chamber tapers in both height and width from one end to the other, and this example follows that pattern, decreasing in height from its western end. The southern wall is formed by two slabs with an outer wall-stone and a small buttress beyond them, a detail that suggests some care was taken with the tomb's construction and structural reinforcement. The northern side has fared less well: the two stones there have collapsed inwards, and a single outer wall-stone on that side now leans heavily southward. Ruaidhrí de Valera and Seán Ó Nualláin documented the site in their 1982 survey of megalithic tombs across Counties Cork, Kerry, Limerick, and Tipperary, and it was subsequently included in a comprehensive archaeological survey of the Iveragh Peninsula published by Cork University Press in 1996.
The setting itself is worth noting. Positioned in a small nook close to a stream and sheltered from the open ground around it, the tomb sits in the kind of modest, unremarkable landscape that many prehistoric monuments seem to favour, far removed from any dramatic promontory or obvious landmark. The proximity to the shore, and the protection offered by the hollow, would have made this a practical as well as perhaps a meaningful location for those who placed their dead here.