Megalithic tomb - wedge tomb, Gleninagh, Co. Clare

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Megalithic Tombs

Megalithic tomb – wedge tomb, Gleninagh, Co. Clare

Two slabs of karst limestone standing in a field beside the sea, thirty metres from a storm beach, might not immediately read as a tomb.

Yet that is precisely what this site near Gleninagh in County Clare is believed to be: the surviving remnant of a wedge tomb, one of the most widespread megalithic tomb types in Ireland, generally dated to the late Neolithic and early Bronze Age. Wedge tombs are so called because their gallery is wider and higher at one end than the other, tapering like a wedge toward the opposite end. Here, erosion and time have reduced the structure to its two principal side slabs, but the characteristic shape is still legible in the stonework.

The two slabs are oriented roughly north-northeast to south-southwest, and the measurements recorded show the widening and the variation in height that define the wedge form. The western stone is 1.9 metres long and sits slightly higher at its northern end; the eastern stone, at 1.5 metres, is considerably higher at its southern end, reaching nearly 0.88 metres. The gap between them widens from 1.3 metres at the northern end to 1.4 metres at the southern, a modest but deliberate divergence. Both upper surfaces are eroded and face outward, suggesting long exposure to the Atlantic weather that rolls in across this part of the Burren coast. What makes the location stranger still is its relationship to the surrounding landscape: the tomb sits approximately equidistant between three fulachtaí fia, the nearest just 28 metres away. A fulacht fia is a type of prehistoric cooking site, typically identified by a horseshoe-shaped mound of heat-shattered stone beside a trough or stream. The presence of several of them clustered around this tomb, if the association is not simply coincidental, hints at a patch of ground that was meaningfully used and perhaps organised during prehistory, even if the nature of any connection between burial monument and cooking sites remains unclear.

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