ireland
& the phallic continuum

satan in the groin

dissident editions

the earth-mother's
lamentation

french
megaliths

egregious.org

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For other tombs with
apertures, see frenchgenius.htm

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Satellite photograph of Western Europe
showing typical Atlantic weather.

IRELAND IN THE 'STONE AGES'

The study of prehistory, unlike History, is almost entirely a matter of dates. Those dates are constantly being up dated, so these pages are not concerned with when or by whom archæologists consider prehistoric tombs to have been built.
Nor when the predecessors of the tomb-builders came to Ireland - but with what they look like now in the entirely man-denuded landscape.

As for what they looked like when they were built in upland clearings of the vast forest that covered most of Ireland and Scotland (except for the windswept coasts and mountains), anyone can easily imagine. In those times there was a wealth of animal and plant-life inconceivable today. The builders of those tombs began the now-inexorable process of man's favourite activity: destruction in the name of construction. History is the account of our fascination by power, its acquisition and exercise.

The builders of those tombs, we the untameable adapters and tamers of landscape, also wiped out - one way or another - the well-adapted Mesolithic hunter-gatherers who lived rather well along the rivers and more favourable estuaries on a rich diet of fish, crustacea, shellfish, nuts, berries and occasional game. Farm-based people are at great pains to say that hunter-gatherers have poor diets - because the opposite is true. Purely farm-based diets produce a very restricted range of foods (with accompanying vitamin-deficiency) in very poor return for huge effort and totalitarian restriction of freedom.

But because technology - however poor at giving us the food we are actually designed to eat, as we are now beginning to realise - always produces weapons for the arthritic, rickety and cancerous, those sick and ever-sicker, ever-more-technological societies wipe out the healthy in body (and especially in mind) in a process of survival of the least fit. And of course invent religion to deny what reason would otherwise show them.

Before the megalithic tombs were constructed, the burial places of the Mesolithic people might be described as places of return to the earth. Megaliths, however, are rather more arrogant and rather more complex. The dead who were deposited in them were, in a sense, not allowed to die, but were used as servants or instruments of the kind of earth-conquering cults (such as Capitalism and Islam and Christianity) that we have today.

I am not concerned, either, with the speculations about the astronomical and astrological significance of certain famous tombs and cemeteries of tombs that enchant so many. The cult of glamorous explanations which hypnotises our culture distances us from these monuments far more than stories of fairies' houses, or the beds of the Hag Goddess - Cailleach Bhéarra - and the legendary eloping lovers Diarmuid and Gráinne.

Although discoveries such as the amazing acoustical properties of many monuments - carefully contrived tricks of sound to impress and intimidate the unpriestly - amplify the poetry of the stones, the atmosphere of the tombs tends to dissipate under the searchlight of our obsessive explaining. From cults of miracles to cults of explanation is one-way traffic. And just as ejaculation is not necessarily orgasm, so explanation is not necessarily understanding.

Suffice it to say that the tombs are obviously houses - or cages - for the dead and records for their progeny. We can see and feel, without the teleologies of excavation, pollen analysis, dendrochronology, carbon-dating, and so on, that some also, like the many stone circles and stone rows, are magical constructions. We can ourselves weave any magic we like around them - ancient or modern. Most of our contemporaries, however, ignore them or are ignorant of their very presence.

Having said all this, it is obvious that different types of tomb were built at different periods. This is convenient for the presentation of these pages - which, of course, include quite a lot of modern interpretation.

The earliest (constructed in large numbers over 4000 years ago) are the Court-tombs , so called because they have an unroofed ceremonial space or court rather like the piazze or assembly-places in front of Christian cathedrals.

Sometimes the courts are beautifully constructed with the 'post-and-panel' technique.

What seems to me interesting is that human presence long preceded tomb-building. This reflects the complete difference of world-view between the hunter-gatherers and the stock-enclosing tomb-builders.

Modern hunter-gatherers, living in forests which they regard as entirely benign and holy, tend to lay out their dead in the forest, covered with brushwood and vegetation or basic/symbolic kinds of shelter, so that they make a sweet and appropriate transition from creature to humus.

But those who clear forests in order to corral animals which, however valuable, they inevitably regard as inferior beings, do not regard the forest as entirely benign (though leaves collected from it are both summer and winter fodder). They tend to regard the spaces they have cleared as 'holy', and they do not like to envisage death as a cyclical process between human and humus.

They - the farmers who have been assigned to the Neolithic or New Stone Age - invented the catastrophically-alienating concept of wealth, which we now see to be reducing the planet to resource and product increasingly overwhelmed by waste. The problem with concepts is that, once invented, they cannot be uninvented. Concepts are as much the contents of Pandora's legendary box as diseases. Thus the concept of "normality" (as distinct from orthodoxy) invented less than 200 years ago, has profoundly affected the lives of those who have a word for it.

Once wealth is invented, the concept of inheritance immediately follows, along with other nasty ideas such as the retention of wealth, as opposed to the distribution of food ensured by (for example) hunter-gatherer potlatch cultures.

From inheritance inevitably arise pedigree- and ancestor-worship of one kind or another. And so imposing tombs arer built, so that human beings can deceive themselves into continuing contact with the dead, either by ritual and trance, or by actual touching of the bones through an aperture - a practice which survived until recently in Europe, and probably still survives in that most conservative and culturally-layered peninsula of Europe, Italy.

Tomb-shrines of early Irish saints also feature apertures for such a purpose.

But to return to Court-tombs, these mostly occur at a certain height (between 200 and 300 metres) because they were built on land cleared where the forest was thinnest - upland which was better-drained than, for example, the river valleys.

Some, near the coasts, occur where forest was thin due to sea-winds. Generally they concentrate to the north and east of Ireland. And, like other forms of Irish megalith, they are distinctively Irish although they have relatives not just in nearby south-west Scotland, but as far away as Languedoc in France, where some Allées-couvertes have an unroofed court-feature.

Like the allées-couvertes, they are long gallery-tombs encased in a covering mound of stones or stones and earth, called a cairn , corresponding to what in England is called a long-barrow. The gallery was where the burials were placed; in Ireland these were almost always burials of ashes after cremation.

Many at first glance look like chaotic heaps of stones, but usually the gallery and/or the court can be discerned.
Some, especially in county Mayo, are still largely embedded in the peat-bog which grew on top of them some centuries after they were built, and are very well-preserved.

The galleries were roofed by large slabs often supported on corbel-stones placed on top of the orthostats or supporting wall-slabs to narrow the gap to be spanned.

Their eponymous courts are most commonly a single, roughly- semicircular forecourt at the wider and higher front end of the cairn, which generally faces east. The orthostats of these courts presented an often-imposing façade.

Sometimes a second forecourt occurs at the rear, making the megalith a Double-court tomb .

More rarely, an unroofed, oval forecourt is found in the middle, with the burial galleries going off from each end, opposing each other along the axis of the tomb. These Central-court tombs are very large and hard to photograph.

Rarer still is the Full-court tomb , in which the forecourt is an oval enclosure approached through a narrow passage.

Occasionally, two separate tombs are close together.

It is often thought that prehistoric tombs have fallen victim only recently to the depredations of "progress". But many were pillaged or deliberately wrecked shortly after their erection.
Similarly, recent discoveries outside the city of Derry have shown that Neolithic farmers were not the peaceful folk that a certain pro-agricultural bias has encouraged us to believe, but fought each other as fiercely as the'Celtic-speaking Irish who were constantly attacking and burning each others' homesteads and rustling each others' cattle. Ireland perhaps has never been a peaceful island.

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Portal-tombs >>
Wedge-tombs >>
Passage-tombs >>
Stone circles >>