Megalithic tomb - wedge tomb, Derrymihin, Co. Cork

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Megalithic Tombs

Megalithic tomb – wedge tomb, Derrymihin, Co. Cork

On the bog-covered slopes above Castletownbere and Berehaven Harbour, a prehistoric tomb sits in rough pasture, its lower stones slowly disappearing into the peat.

It is a modest structure by any measure, barely a metre and a half long, yet the way it has settled over the millennia gives it an oddly expressive quality. The large roofstone, measuring roughly 1.85 by 1.75 metres, has slipped forward over a collapsed sidestone and now tilts down toward the southwest, effectively sealing the western end of the monument from the outside.

This is a wedge tomb, a type of megalithic burial monument built during the Late Neolithic and Early Bronze Age, typically between about 2500 and 2000 BC. The form is characteristic: a gallery that narrows from one end to the other, usually aligned with the wider end facing west or southwest. Here, the gallery runs ENE to WSW, closed at the eastern end by a single backstone. The north side is formed by one slab; the south by two uprights, the western of which leans noticeably inward. A roofstone still partially covers the chamber, though its current position, slipped and sloping, is almost certainly not original. An inclined slab just outside the southern wall near the backstone may be a remnant of outer-walling, the kind of low enclosing structure sometimes built around the main gallery. That the lower portions of the tomb are enveloped in peat only adds to the sense of a monument still in the process of being reclaimed. Nearby, 140 metres to the northeast, a standing stone occupies the same rough landscape, and 180 metres to the southeast lies a fulacht fia, a type of ancient cooking site typically identified by a horseshoe-shaped mound of fire-cracked stone beside a trough. The three features together suggest this stretch of hillside was a place of sustained, purposeful human activity in prehistory.

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