Now in the soggy remains of a bog the court tomb in Cloghanmore may have been built originally in good agricultural land.
The Voices from Dawn blog covers this site in much detail – which I will summarise. People cutting a bog discovered stones, and these stones were initially used to build walls etc. The Board of Works then stopped this devolution of the site, reconstructing the site c.1886-1887. Their workers took the pile of stones from the collapsed (and quarried) cairn and used these to finish the wall around the site and give it a more definite court-tomb look. This might all seem like a bad idea, but the intervention of the Board basically saved the site.
One of the most important thing about this site is an an orthostat (An upright stone set in ground) with the rock-art designs. Though I visited the site, I would never have seen this were in not point out on Voices from the Dawn – and I am borrowing a modified version of an image on the blog to show it below. Very subtle, you really have to know what you are looking for .
Though it is a boggy landscape, a wooden path has been erected to allow visitors reach the site.
The landscape, stripped of its former bog, is a wild and desolated place. But yet several thousand years past, people came together on this land to build something that emerged from a community longing for marking the landscape with massive stones. It required many people back-breaking work to move all those stones to this area. At a time when all food and shelter required a lot of work – that we now take for granted in Ireland – they had a high level of commitment to imagine and then complete this project.
Read more
http://www.megalithicireland.com/Cloghanmore%20Court%20Tomb.html
