Megalithic tomb - wedge tomb, Eantybeg, Co. Clare

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Megalithic Tombs

Megalithic tomb – wedge tomb, Eantybeg, Co. Clare

A low, broken mound sitting near the crest of a south-facing slope in County Clare holds a wedge tomb, a type of prehistoric megalithic burial monument, typically dating from the late Neolithic into the early Bronze Age, in which the chamber narrows and lowers from front to back like a wedge.

This one is modest in scale, the chamber roughly two and a half metres long, but it commands wide views to the south and west across rough pasture, and the choice of position feels deliberate. A modern drystone field wall runs along the eastern edge of the mound, a reminder that farming life has carried on around and beside these ancient stones for centuries without much ceremony.

The tomb was described in detail by Ruaidhrí de Valera and Seán Ó Nualláin in their 1961 Survey of the Megalithic Tombs of Ireland, the first volume of which covered County Clare. Their account records a chamber built from very coarse limestone slabs, each sidestone a single upright piece set on its long edge, the eastern one leaning westward with a flaked and uneven top, the western one slightly thinner and concave along its upper edge. The southern end of the chamber shows signs of disturbance; two upright slabs near the entrance were identified as possibly displaced doorstones, one leaning north, the other leaning south but described as well set. Two further slabs lay across the width of the chamber interior, one flat on the ground, the other firmly upright but judged by de Valera and Ó Nualláin to be out of its original position. The mound enclosing all of this measures roughly eleven metres north to south and ten metres east to west, rising only about sixty centimetres above the surrounding ground. An inspection carried out in 1998 found nothing had changed since the 1961 survey. A second wedge tomb lies approximately 350 metres to the south, making this a landscape in which prehistoric funerary monuments appear not as isolated curiosities but as neighbours to one another across a stretch of Clare hillside.

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