Megalithic tomb - wedge tomb, Teeskagh, Co. Clare

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Megalithic Tombs

Megalithic tomb – wedge tomb, Teeskagh, Co. Clare

One of the stranger qualities of Ireland's prehistoric landscape is how thoroughly the living have repurposed the dead.

In a slight hollow on the north-western side of a ridge in Teeskagh, County Clare, a wedge tomb, one of the most common megalithic tomb types in Ireland, built to house human remains during the late Neolithic and early Bronze Age, has been quietly absorbed into the surrounding farmland. Its largest surviving stone, a substantial sidestone running nearly three metres in length, was at some point incorporated into a drystone field wall that follows the same north-east to south-west alignment as the tomb itself. The wall still stands. The tomb, less so.

Wedge tombs are so called because the burial gallery typically narrows and lowers towards the back, giving the structure a wedge-like profile when viewed from above. This example, reported by Paul Walsh and Vincent Steadman, preserves the basic skeletal outline of that form: the large south-eastern sidestone now doing double duty as field boundary; a leaning endstone at the north-east end; and two smaller endstones set side by side at the south-west. The dimensions recorded are modest, the stones low and thin, and the overall impression is one of a monument that has been slowly digested by the agricultural landscape around it. It sits within an extensive multiperiod field system, meaning the organised division of this land did not begin with medieval farmers or early modern ones, but reaches back across several distinct eras of use and reuse.

The hollow in which the tomb sits is rough pasture, and the field wall that now incorporates the main sidestone is the most immediately visible feature. Looking at the structure from the south-east, as the recorded photograph shows, the line between prehistoric monument and later boundary becomes almost impossible to draw. That ambiguity is, in its own way, the point.

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