Megalithic tomb - wedge tomb, Rausker, Co. Monaghan

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Megalithic Tombs

Megalithic tomb – wedge tomb, Rausker, Co. Monaghan

On the eastern slope of a drumlin ridge in County Monaghan, a prehistoric burial monument sits quietly absorbed into the landscape.

What makes it quietly anomalous is its condition: two roof stones have slipped from their original position and now lie displaced across the gallery, leaving the interior of this ancient structure exposed to the sky in a way its builders never intended. The tomb is a wedge tomb, a type of megalithic monument common in Ireland during the late Neolithic and early Bronze Age, characterised by a long stone-built gallery that narrows toward one end, often covered by a cairn or earthen mound. Here at Rausker, the whole structure is set within a mound measuring eleven metres in length and five metres wide.

The tomb's gallery runs roughly northeast to southwest, measuring three metres long and less than a metre across, with a short portico at the southwestern end. Two stone buttresses flank the gallery, and a single outer walling stone survives on the northwestern side. Much of what we know about the monument's layout comes from a plan drawn up in 1936 by H. G. Tempest, whose record captured the arrangement of the stones at a time when systematic documentation of such sites was still relatively uncommon. The tomb was later catalogued by de Valera and Ó Nualláin in their 1982 survey of Irish megalithic tombs, which confirmed its classification as a wedge tomb. Its position on the spine of an east-facing drumlin ridge, one of the rounded glacially formed hills that define so much of the Monaghan countryside, suggests a deliberate choice of elevated, visible ground by the people who built it thousands of years ago.

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