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Keamcorravooly, county Cork

Wedge-tombs come, æsthetically speaking, between Court-tombs and Portal-tombs : a little less compact and rather less striking than the latter; much more compact than the former. Their roofstones have not been chosen for their distinction, they do not have impressive portal- or jamb-stones, and they generally are not more than 1.5 metres high. They are called Wedge-tombs because they are taller and wider at the straight-façaded front (which always faces south-west) than at the back.

Many of these tombs resemble to some extent the squat dolmens-simples of France, though they rarely are quite so simple. Wedge-tombs in the west of Ireland, especially in the little limestone karst or causse of The Burren, are box-shaped,

and like all Irish wedge-tombs have distinctive close double-walling of the gallery: a feature found in a few French tombs.

This chamber is sometimes entered through a small antechamber or portico, from which it is divided by a septal slab or large sill-stone. Those wedge-tombs which are not box-like (the majority) tend to be D-shaped, with straight façade of matched orthostats and a tapering or heel-shaped chamber behind it. The cairn also tends to be D-shaped.

Wedge-tombs, built a little later than Portal-tombs, are associated with people who had the techniques for smelting copper and tin and making bronze. Thus they were able to cut down more trees and work previously-intractable and inaccessible land - a process which has gathered pace across the millennia, so that Ireland is now the least-forested country in Europe . (More recently, trees have been felled merely to winter-feed cattle with the ivy growing upon them!)

Their distribution stretches across the uplands of the whole island including the south and west, where very few earlier tombs were built. Those in the north-east of Ireland tend to be fairly elaborate, and feature a double or divided entrance created by the insertion of an orthostat in the entrance to the portico.

A handful are highly reminiscent of the long gallery-tombs or alleés-couvertes of France.

But most are modest, almost homely, structures.

Some feature apertures through which a soul might escape or ritual food be offered.

The period of their construction coincides both with deterioration of the climate and overgrazing, which turned the fertile and well-drained lower uplands to blanket-bog: yet another human Land of Lost Content among dozens, such as Eden and the Sahara.

Many wedge-tombs, like most of the stone circles and rows that were built around the same time or later - and unlike the tombs which preceded them - tend to face the winter or summer sunset: the souls of the departed, perhaps, could fly out through the door and follow it, persuade it to return (or, on the other hand, continue) in its former warm and life-enhancing splendour.

On the other hand, he entrances of many of the Munster (Cork & Kerry) tombs face towards the settings of the major and minor southern moons.

A terrible fear of Bronze-age people in Northern Europe must have been that the climate would keep on deteriorating, and that one day the sun simply would not rise. And, perhaps, that the sun was rising only by human inducement through prayer, ritual and the orientation of architecture.

When there are examples of so many tombs, we should remember that each one (like each modern school) was different, and built by separate groups or communities of people. There is unlikely to have been one single cult or belief-system or even cosmology. Moreover, we must distinguish between the builders' intentions and the uses to which the tombs were put by later generations or incoming people- like, for example, 19th century National Schools today, some of which are private homes, while others are craft-boutiques.

As for the enigma of the double-walling, so similar to modern cavity-construction - the mystery remains.

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