Megalithic tomb - wedge tomb, Curragraigue, Co. Kerry

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Megalithic Tombs

Megalithic tomb – wedge tomb, Curragraigue, Co. Kerry

On a south-west-facing slope above the Sheen River valley in County Kerry, a prehistoric tomb sits in rough pasture, its stones slowly settling into the hillside over several millennia.

It is a wedge tomb, a type of megalithic burial monument characteristic of the later Neolithic and early Bronze Age in Ireland, so called because the chamber narrows from one end to the other like a wedge driven into the earth. This one follows the pattern faithfully: 2.5 metres long, wider at the west-south-west end at 1.8 metres, tapering to 1.1 metres at the east-north-east, where a backstone closes the chamber off.

The alignment, running roughly east-north-east to west-south-west, is typical of the wedge tomb tradition, in which the wider, open end generally faces the setting sun. A single roofstone, measuring 1.8 metres by 1.1 metres and only 15 centimetres thick, still covers the chamber. The structural picture is not entirely intact, however. The sidestone on the southern side has shifted and now leans away from its presumed original position, while the northern side retains just one sidestone. Two large slabs lying further downslope to the south-west may once have formed part of the monument, perhaps displaced over time by the slow movement of the ground or by human interference at some point in the intervening centuries.

The setting itself adds something to the experience of the place. The slope faces down into the Sheen River valley, a view that whoever built this tomb would also have known, and there is a particular quality to standing beside a structure this age in unimproved pasture, without interpretation boards or enclosures, where the stones are simply there, in the landscape, doing what they have done for thousands of years.

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