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county list
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| Court-tombs = Portal-tombs = Wedge-tombs = Passage-tombs = Stone Circles | France | |
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SELECTED MONUMENTS IN
Place-names in italics refer to listed entries.
Aghnaskeagh: Megalithic tombs
Two interesting, if overgrown, cairns lie some 6.8 km NNE of Dundalk not far from a poultry factory. About 45 metres apart, one is egg-shaped with a roofless dolmen at one end with portal-stones 2.8 metres high. At the other end of this cairn were 6 kist-tombs inserted some time during the Bronze Age. A paved area close to the N end of th cairn was later still used for iron-smelting - the sacred site chosen, perhaps, to give power to the magical metal.
~ 2.8 km SW, about 150 metres W of a by-road in Faughart Lower , is a diminutive passage-tomb incorporated into a field-fence. It looks a bit like a sweathouse , of which there are some examples in N. Louth: a small chamber formed by 5 split-boulder orthostats and roofed by a single capstone. There is no trace of either covering mound or entrance passage.
Ballinloughan: Petroglyphs
click on the thumbnail for a larger picture
1.6 km N of Little Ash, by a stream in the second field (300 metres along a track to the right of a gate) beyond the end of a lane leading NE from the road to Inniskeen from Little Ash, lies a boulder (not marked on the map) with complex motifs of cups and gapped rings. There were originally five boulders here - of which three were wantonly destroyed in 1980. They included a design rare in Ireland: the ring of small cups within a cup-and-ring design ( cf Ormaig in Argyll). The pocking on this design and on some of the others could clearly be seen. They were the most interesting and most easily found (!) of a series of petroglyphs in W Louth and E Monaghan. Another stone similar to the one by the stream is now in the National Museum in Dublin.
Hurlstone: Holed stone
700 metres down a track leading SW off the R.165, on the SE side of the track, this superb slab, 1.6 metres high and 1.8 metres broad at the base, has a perfectly circular perforation roughly in the middle. It is 20 cms in diameter, splaying to about 25 cms. This part of Louth used to be rich in standing-stones, and "The Hurl Stone" is one of a chain of stones possibly forming some kind of boundary - though equally it might be the only remnant (a perforated door-slab) of a wedge-tomb.
click on the thumbnail for a larger picture
~ 7.2 kms S in the middle of a field (H 947 803) is a decorated stone at Mullagharoy with pecked concentric rings near the top, and natural solution pits.
Proleek: Portal-tomb and Wedge-tomb
Approached via Ballymascanlon House Hotel, and on foot through the stableyard, following the signs, this fine dolmen, known as
The Giant's Load
, has a huge 40-tonne capstone balanced on two portal-stones over 21 metres high and a backstone 1.8 metres high. There may not have been other stones to complete the chamber. There are always many pebbles on top of the domed capstone: if one tossed up does not come rolling down again, the thrower will be married within twelve months! Close by is a ruined
wedge-tomb
, two of whose roofstones survive.
~ 5 km ESE is a large court-tomb at Rockmarshall, about 50 metres SW of Rockmarshall House. It has a broad court of low stones, and a wide, four-chambered gallery entered through fine jamb-stones and a displaced lintel. Some kerbstones survive on the NW side, and some of the cairn on the SE.
Tinure: Petroglyphs
A scandalously-unprotected and defaced slab over 2 metres high and 1.5 metres wide, partly-obscured by brambles, lies 70 metres N of the by-road from Tinure Cross to Kieran's Cross. It is not marked on the map. The vertical face of Silurian shale is decorated by fine incised lines and tiny punched holes - partly obscured by the initials of vandals. These engravings are thought to be of Neolithic rather than Bronze Age date, and are unique in Ireland.
~ 350 metres S in Paddock (O 050 831 and marked on the map) is a low, overgrown wedge-tomb known as "Calliagh Birra's House", with 4 large roofstones still covering the gallery, and 7 transverse buttress-stones, set in remnants of the cairn, on the S side. |
