Megalithic tomb - wedge tomb, Ratooragh, Co. Cork

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Megalithic Tombs

Megalithic tomb – wedge tomb, Ratooragh, Co. Cork

On a bog-covered shoulder of the hill known as Knockaughna in west Cork, a prehistoric wedge tomb sits close to a natural scarp of outcropping rock, its chamber pointing open to the south-west.

Wedge tombs, so called because their chambers taper in both width and height from one end to the other, are the most numerous class of megalithic monument in Ireland, built during the late Neolithic and early Bronze Age by farming communities who used them for collective burial. This one is modest in scale but structurally coherent: the chamber runs just over two metres in length, widening from less than a metre at its eastern end to around 1.3 metres at the west, with each side wall formed from a single large slab that decreases in height as it moves eastward.

The construction follows a pattern familiar to the type. A single roofstone covers the eastern portion of the chamber, a backstone is set into the narrower end, and a parallel slab of equal width and height backs it on the outside. A small buttress-stone stands at the south-east corner, likely placed there to stabilise the structure. A prostrate slab lying to the west of the chamber may be a displaced second roofstone, though its original position is uncertain. Faint traces of a covering mound survive to the north. The record draws on fieldwork published by Seán Ó Nualláin in 1989, whose systematic survey catalogued wedge tombs across Ireland and placed this example within the broader corpus of the form.

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