Megalithic tomb - wedge tomb, Gortlahard, Co. Kerry

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Megalithic Tombs

Megalithic tomb – wedge tomb, Gortlahard, Co. Kerry

On a south-facing slope above the valley of the Sheen River in County Kerry, a large flat roofstone sits almost flush with the ground, its upper surface level with the grassy mound that surrounds it.

That mound, roughly ten metres across and about a metre high, is in fact a cairn, a prehistoric heap of stones now so thoroughly colonised by turf and rough pasture that the burial chamber beneath it could easily be mistaken for a natural feature of the hillside. It is only when you approach closely that the geometry becomes clear.

This is a wedge tomb, a type of megalithic monument built in Ireland broadly during the late Neolithic and early Bronze Age, typically between around 2500 and 2000 BC. The name comes from the shape of the chamber itself: wider and higher at one end, tapering toward the other. Here, the chamber runs northeast to southwest, measuring 2.6 metres in length and 1.3 metres wide at the broader southwestern entrance, narrowing to 0.9 metres at the northeastern end, where a single backstone closes the passage. Five sidestones frame the chamber, two on the southeast side and three on the northwest, and a single roofstone, measuring roughly 2.1 by 2 metres, slopes gently downward toward the closed end. The whole structure is enclosed within the circular cairn, whose accumulated stones bring the ground level up to meet the roofstone almost exactly. Nearby, the faint traces of relict field boundaries survive in the landscape, one close to the northeast of the tomb and another approximately sixty metres to the west, suggesting that the people who built or used this monument also farmed and divided the land around it.

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