Remains of 'lost' bronze age tomb discovered in County Kerry in Ireland

Guardian UK ^ | Thursday, January 18, 2024 | Rory Carroll

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The remnants of a bronze age tomb once thought to have been destroyed and lost to history have been discovered in County Kerry on the Atlantic coast of Ireland.

The tomb, known locally as Altóir na Gréine – the sun altar – stood for approximately 4,000 years on a hill outside the village of Ballyferriter on the Dingle peninsula before vanishing in the mid-19th century...

Georgiana Chatterton, an English aristocrat and traveller, had visited the site and sketched the monument in 1838, but 14 years later an antiquarian named Richard Hitchcock reported that it had been broken up and carried away, presumably for building purposes.

The tomb raiders, it turns out, were not so thorough.

Billy Mag Fhloinn, a folklorist who is part of an archaeological mapping project, recently visited and filmed the site. When converting the video into a 3D scan he noticed that a stone in the undergrowth resembled one from Lady Chatterton's Victorian-era sketch.

He sent the material to the National Monuments Service in Dublin, which dispatched archaeologist Caimin O'Brien, who confirmed it belonged to a so-called wedge tomb dating from the early bronze age between 2500BC and 2000 BC.

There is a capstone and several large upright stones called orthostats, comprising about a quarter of the original tomb, Mag Fhloinn said on Thursday. "People had assumed it was all destroyed."

...Ireland has several hundred wedge tombs, used by bronze age peoples to inter bodies and for ceremonies...

"There is a theory that this specific type of tomb links into a people who carried out copper mining," he said. "There is also a comparison to similar-type tombs found in Brittany in France."

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Billy Mag Fhloinn with the remnants of the tomb.

Photograph: Seán Mac an tSíthigh/RTÉ News

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