Megalithic tomb - wedge tomb, Lackaduv, Co. Cork
Co. Cork |
Megalithic Tombs
A single roofstone, over two metres across and more than thirty centimetres thick, sits atop a small stone gallery in the Lackaduv foothills of the Boggeragh Mountains in County Cork.
The structure is modest in scale but precise in its arrangement, and the fact that it has survived largely intact, roofstone and all, makes it quietly remarkable among the megalithic monuments of the region.
Wedge tombs are the most numerous type of megalithic tomb in Ireland, built during the late Neolithic and into the Bronze Age, roughly 4,000 to 2,500 years ago. The name comes from the characteristic shape of the burial gallery, which is wider and taller at one end and tapers toward the other. At Lackaduv, that taper is measurable: the gallery runs northwest to southeast, opening at 0.9 metres wide at the western end and narrowing to 0.55 metres at the east, where a backstone closes it off. Three sidestones line each of the north and south walls, and a transversely set stone at the western entrance functions something like a door jamb. Two of the outer-wall stones on the northern side have shifted considerably over the millennia, leaning markedly away from the structure, and a large outer-wall stone sits roughly 0.4 metres clear of the eastern backstone, slightly detached from the main arrangement. The tomb sits on a gently sloping shoulder of northeast-facing hillside with open views east across the valley of the Awboy River. About 140 metres to the west-northwest, a standing stone occupies the same landscape, a reminder that these monuments rarely existed in isolation but were part of a broader pattern of deliberate placement across the terrain.