Megalithic tomb - wedge tomb, Lackamore, Co. Tipperary

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Megalithic Tombs

Megalithic tomb – wedge tomb, Lackamore, Co. Tipperary

At the north-eastern end of the Arra Mountains in County Tipperary, a small cluster of ancient stones sits quietly among the hills of Lackamore.

What survives here is a wedge tomb, one of the most common megalithic tomb types in Ireland, typically dating to the late Neolithic or early Bronze Age, characterised by a gallery that narrows and lowers from one end to the other. This particular example is fragmentary enough that it demands a certain imaginative effort from anyone who encounters it, but what remains is still legible as architecture, still recognisably the product of deliberate, considered construction.

The tomb originally consisted of a gallery divided by a septal stone, a slab set upright across the interior to partition the space, creating a small portico at the south-west end and a main chamber beyond it. The portico is now represented by a single orthostat, one of the large upright stones that would have formed the walls of the gallery. The main chamber, measuring roughly 1.15 to 1.35 metres wide and now about 2.4 metres long, retains two orthostats, one on either side, but its backstone is gone. A roofstone that once covered part of the structure has slipped and now rests against the southern side of the chamber. Three stones forming a close-set outer wall survive to the north, and there are traces of a mound on the western side, a remnant of the earthen or stony cairn that would originally have covered or surrounded the tomb. The structure was recorded and catalogued by Ruaidhrí de Valera and Seán Ó Nualláin in their 1982 survey of megalithic tombs across counties Cork, Kerry, Limerick, and Tipperary, a landmark work in Irish prehistoric archaeology.

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