Megalithic tomb - wedge tomb, Milltown, Co. Clare

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Megalithic Tombs

Megalithic tomb – wedge tomb, Milltown, Co. Clare

There is nothing to see here, and that is precisely what makes this patch of Co. Clare pasture worth knowing about.

Somewhere beneath the gently sloping, south-east-facing farmland at Milltown lies what scholars believe to be the site of a wedge tomb, one of the most widespread megalithic monument types in Ireland, characteristically built with a roofed gallery that tapers and lowers toward the narrower end. No stone protrudes from the soil, no earthwork disturbs the grass, and the site never appeared on any edition of the Ordnance Survey's historic mapping. To all appearances, it is an ordinary field with a mature tree standing toward its north-western corner and a hedged boundary running some fourteen metres to the south-west.

The identification of this spot as a probable wedge tomb rests largely on the fieldwork of Ruaidhrí de Valera and Seán Ó Nualláin, whose 1961 survey of megalithic tombs in County Clare catalogued it cautiously, using the qualifier "probable" rather than confirmed. The earlier antiquarian Thomas Johnson Westropp had described a number of megalithic structures in this part of Clare in papers published between 1902 and 1904, though later researchers found that not all of his accounts could be cleanly matched to specific recorded sites. That ambiguity has followed this location ever since. What adds a certain quiet interest to the uncertainty is the proximity of another wedge tomb site, recorded just fifty-five metres to the north, suggesting that whatever once stood here was not an isolated monument but part of a broader prehistoric presence in this landscape.

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