Megalithic tomb - wedge tomb, Cooldorragha, Co. Cork

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Megalithic Tombs

Megalithic tomb – wedge tomb, Cooldorragha, Co. Cork

At the foot of a rocky ridge in the River Lee valley, a loose scatter of five stones sits roughly four and a half metres from the rock-face.

Taken individually, they might mean nothing. Taken together, they are the surviving remnants of what is almost certainly a prehistoric wedge tomb, one of the most common megalithic tomb types in Ireland, typically dating from the late Neolithic into the early Bronze Age and characterised by a gallery that narrows and lowers from one end to the other.

The gallery here, aligned roughly east-northeast to west-southwest, once measured over 2.2 metres in length and around 1.3 metres wide at the western end. Three stones remain on the northern side, two on the southern, and a single tall stone, standing 1.45 metres high, marks the western end of the northern side. It is in very poor condition, and scholars have noted some uncertainty about whether it can be firmly classified as a wedge tomb at all. Seán Ó Nualláin, writing in 1989, concluded that the interpretation as a wedge tomb was not inconsistent with the physical evidence, which is a careful way of saying the stones do fit the pattern, even if little enough of the original structure survives to be certain. The setting, tucked against a natural outcrop in the Lee valley, would not be unusual for such monuments, which were often placed in upland or marginal landscapes.

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