Megalithic tomb - wedge tomb, Manning, Co. Cork

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Megalithic Tombs

Megalithic tomb – wedge tomb, Manning, Co. Cork

On a north-facing slope of rough pasture near Manning in County Cork, a small megalithic tomb has been slowly disappearing into the landscape.

What survives is a wedge tomb, a type of prehistoric burial monument common across Munster and dating broadly to the late Neolithic and early Bronze Age, in which a stone-walled gallery narrows from one end to the other, typically aligned with the wider end facing west or south-west. This particular example is modest even by the standards of the form: the gallery stretches just 2.9 metres in length, widening from 0.85 metres at its western end to 1.1 metres at the east. Three sidestones remain to the north of the gallery, two to the south, and the eastern end-stone has fallen. A single facade stone still stands about a metre west of the gallery opening, with an outer-wall stone tucked just behind it to the east, and faint traces of the original covering mound can still be made out around the structure.

The tomb was already in poor condition when it received its earliest recorded attention. An account from the early twentieth century, published by Grove White between 1905 and 1925, noted that the roofstone had by then already been destroyed, a fate that befell many such monuments across Ireland as farmers cleared land or quarried convenient stone. The structure was later catalogued by Ruaidhrí de Valera and Seán Ó Nualláin in their systematic survey of megalithic tombs across Cork, Kerry, Limerick, and Tipperary, published in 1982, which placed it second in their Cork listing. That survey remains one of the foundational records of Irish prehistoric monuments, and this small overgrown gallery in north Cork, easy to walk past without recognising it for what it is, sits quietly within it.

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