Despite its poor state of preservation I have rarely come across an ancient monument so intriguing.

Its location and appearance were counter intuitive and out of context. Moreover, it shouldn’t have been there.

I had checked the heritage map before I started out, and there were no scheduled sites of any kind indicated for this side of the mountain.

I stumbled upon it whilst searching in a lazy sort of way for Rock Art sites in Monydoo (black bogland) above Swanlinbar.

The day was sunny and warm which induced a moseying manner to proceedings.

Having spotted a ruined stone cottage earlier, I had decided to investigate it on my return loop back to the car.

Coming down on it from the summit of Cratty hill the house nestled nicely into the lee of the slope, sitting proud on a small eminence above an open and treeless landscape of heather and rough ground.

It was surrounded by small field enclosures of collapsed stone walls which peeped above the heather. 

Climbing the slight incline to the house I saw several large upright stones, and at right angles to them a similar number of horizontal stones closer to ground level. It didn’t make sense.

They were clearly too large and out of place within what appeared to be a small domestic garden enclosure at the rear of the building.

Passing around the stones I entered through a door opening and explored the two roomed roofless house with sheds tagged on to each gable wall. 

Returning to stand at the rear door I realised that the back wall of the house was separated by only a metre from the side of the large stone structure.

Any closer and it would have been inside the house. Its long tell-tale oblong shape, the dividing stone in the centre which created two gallery burial chambers, and upright portal stones at either end left me in no doubt: this was the carcass of a megalithic tomb.

However, like gaps from extracted teeth in a jawline it was evident that a few larger horizontal orthostat stones were missing, as were the cap stones that once covered it.

An inspection of the base of the house walls showed that some at least had been moved across and used for foundations.

Moreover, what appeared to be four large outer revetement stones remained in position.

The structure was on a northeast/southwest axis, probably aligned to a solstice, and lay at a similar elevation to other tombs scattered around Cuilcagh.

Clearly, the derelict house had been built using the cairn material which had once covered this tomb, and when the stones had been exhausted by the builders, they also recycled some of the larger heavier stones from the superstructure of the tomb under it.

By repurposing this grave material, they had transformed a five and a half thousand-year-old monument into a domestic dwelling and concealed it for the last two hundred years or so from those who made it their business to seek and record such things.

It was so well camouflaged that it had been overlooked by the first 1835 Ordnance Survey and subsequent revisions.

The house builders had inadvertently hidden it in plain sight, and it had remained free from scrutiny ever since. A feral monument. It seemed a shame to tame it.

But we humans are, after all, the measure of all things, so reverting to type I reluctantly considered what category of megalithic tomb it might be.

Court tombs, portal tombs, and early small passage tombs are dated to the Neolithic or Stone Age around 3500 BCE.

Their chambers contained human bones, cremated remains, pottery, animal bones and stone tools.

They were built by farming communities, presumably under instruction by elites who, like us today, were aware of the inevitability of death and desired perhaps to leave something to honour their dead and be a visual reminder of their importance long into the future.

There are about two thousand tombs in Ireland, and over millennia many were robbed out for their mounds of stone so that only the supporting internal side stones of the tomb remained, as here in Monydoo.

Hence the difficulty in categorising them due to their often-radical transformation and repurposing by succeeding generations. 

But who were the humble house builders who lived cheek by jowl with the ancient dead? Clearly, need and handy access to a source of building material overrode any concerns they may have had about the intimacy of its position to the tomb.

Records from Griffiths Valuation show that around 1860 the tenants of the land rented five sections of Monydoo, most of it in better land below near Swanlinbar, so perhaps they were wealthy enough not to have to live in this house where bog and marginal grazing land meet close to the wild and remote Cuilcagh uplands. 

But no, local man Jude McHugh remembered his grandfather telling him about this landscape being peppered with houses, often mud built and that around 1900 he had céilied in the “wee house with a garden at the back” which was still occupied then. 

The act of living so close to such a tomb, never mind destroying its fabric, is intriguing.

After all, we all know what happens to those who willfully destroy raths, forts and fairy trees, never mind a Giants Grave such as this.

Surely there must be some folk memory about those who lived alongside this ancient burial site: could Jude provide a link to local superstitions and tales of attendant misfortune? Alas, no. 

It is possible of course that the house had been built prior to 1860, by other earlier occupants before the Famine when the population was highest, and land was being squared by landlords to improve yields and profits.

Many people, mostly nameless untenanted labourers and craft workers often existed between the lines of bookkeepers and land agents who tolerated them, and the houses they built, as long as rent was paid. We may never know. 

This once mighty cathedral of a tomb is now reduced to ruins by time and circumstance and lies in a state unimagined by its Neolithic builders thousands of years ago.

Because they had a different set of needs, those who transformed it into the conjoined structure we see today found a new meaning for the abandoned structure, and in doing so added poignant meaning to the saying that necessity is the mother of invention.

 

Thanks to: Gaby Burns, Robert Henshall, Alma Mc Manus, Tom McHugh and Jude McHugh.

A longer version of this article, and previous Impartial Reporter articles, can be read on Barneys’ blog https://notes-from-the-field.blog

3D images by Gaby Burns of Monydoo can be seen on https://skfb.ly/oUGX8.