Megalithic tomb - wedge tomb, Coolycasey, Co. Clare

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Megalithic Tombs

Megalithic tomb – wedge tomb, Coolycasey, Co. Clare

In the townland of Coolycasey in County Clare, a wedge tomb survives from the later Neolithic or early Bronze Age, a quiet presence in the landscape that most people pass without knowing it is there.

Wedge tombs are the most numerous megalithic tomb type in Ireland, with several hundred recorded across the country, and Clare has a particularly dense concentration of them. They take their name from their profile: the burial chamber is typically wider and higher at one end, tapering toward the other, and the whole structure is usually orientated to face the west or south-west, toward the setting sun. They were built, broadly speaking, between about 2500 and 2000 BC, and were used as collective burial places, sometimes over several generations.

Beyond its classification and location, the specific details of the Coolycasey tomb, its dimensions, its state of preservation, whether its capstone survives, remain unrecorded in publicly available sources at present. That absence is itself a small footnote in the ongoing work of cataloguing Ireland's prehistoric monuments, many of which sit in fields and on hillsides, known to locals but largely undocumented in accessible form. Clare's wedge tombs cluster particularly in the Burren and its fringes, where the bare limestone makes ancient stonework easier to spot, though examples like this one in Coolycasey extend beyond that more celebrated region into quieter, less-visited ground.

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