Megalithic tomb - wedge tomb, Leitrim Beg, Co. Cork

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Megalithic Tombs

Megalithic tomb – wedge tomb, Leitrim Beg, Co. Cork

On the western arm of Sugarloaf Mountain, a prehistoric tomb lies half-swallowed by bog, looking out over Bantry Bay from a narrow, south-facing shoulder of land.

It is the kind of place that could pass entirely unnoticed, its stones long since tipped and shifted, the whole structure absorbed into the landscape over millennia. What survives is a wedge tomb, a burial monument type common in the west and south of Ireland during the late Neolithic and early Bronze Age, typically consisting of a roofed stone gallery that narrows slightly toward one end, the whole thing set within a low cairn or mound.

The gallery here measures 3.3 metres in length and roughly a metre across, aligned on a northeast-to-southwest axis. Each of the two long sides is formed by a pair of sidestones, with a backstone closing the eastern end and a septal stone, a dividing or closing slab that would once have helped define the chamber's interior, fallen to the west. Two roofstones have come down into the chamber area, where they now lie across a pair of outer-wall stones that have themselves collapsed inward to the north. The whole structure is set within a mound measuring 8.5 metres by 7 metres. Séan Ó Nualláin, whose 1989 survey of Irish wedge tombs remains the standard reference for these monuments, recorded the site in that work. The degree of collapse and the depth of bog covering suggest it has gone largely undisturbed for a very long time, which in one sense is a kind of preservation, even if it makes the original form harder to read.

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