Megalithic tomb - wedge tomb, Tooreen By., Co. Cork

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Megalithic Tombs

Megalithic tomb – wedge tomb, Tooreen By., Co. Cork

On a south-east-facing slope near the head of a small valley above Crook Haven, a prehistoric tomb sits tilted at an angle that suggests something has been quietly going wrong for several thousand years.

The entire structure leans sharply to the south, giving it an off-kilter presence that sets it apart from the more composed monuments of the surrounding landscape. It is a wedge tomb, the most common megalithic tomb type in Ireland, so called because the gallery is typically wider and higher at the entrance end and tapers toward the back, like a stone wedge driven into the hillside. This one is modest in scale, its gallery measuring just 1.8 metres in length and roughly a metre wide, open to the west in keeping with the characteristic orientation of the type.

The structure consists of two sidestones on the northern side, three on the southern, and an inset backstone closing the eastern end, the whole covered by a single roofstone. There is no indication of a surrounding mound, which in better-preserved examples would have enveloped much of the stonework. The monument was documented by Ruaidhrí de Valera and Seán Ó Nualláin in their Survey of the Megalithic Tombs of Ireland, published in 1982, which placed it at the north-east end of a ridge overlooking Crook Haven. Approximately 75 metres to the south-west lies another tomb, in the townland of Arduslough, suggesting that this stretch of West Cork upland once held particular significance for the communities who raised these structures.

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