'Craughaun Cemetery' : Wedge Tomb

TownlandBillinphunta
CountyClare
Grid RefR 479 616
Longitude8° 46' 14.98" W
Latitude52° 42' 11.12" N
ITM east480366
ITM north584435
Nearest TownCratloe (0.8 Km)
OS Sheet58
UTM zone29U
UTM x449041
UTM y5761192
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Visit Notes

Sunday, 5th January 2003

This is a beauty! I nearly didn't see it from the road, because it is beyond a railway line. The map shows it about 200m to one side of the cemetery, but amazingly it is actually IN the cemetery.

A square-ish roof slab, with lots of lovely solution pits in it, sits atop some great orthostats forming a chamber about 1.5m x 1.2m. It is on a raised dias, almost as if it has pride of place in the cemetery, overlooking the modern graves.

This is a really nice example of continuation of use for a location.

A barrow is essentially a mound of earth over one or more burials. They are more usually to be dated to the Bronze Age. There are many forms of barrow including ring, bowl, long and bell barrows.

Ring barrows are formed by digging a circular trench or fosse around a central burial, with no mound.

Bowl barrows are formed by heaping up soil over the burial(s) from a surrounding fosse, these often have an external bank too (see Ballyremon Commons (County Wicklow)).

Bell barows are simply round mounds with no fosse or external bank.

Long barrows are rare in Ireland and are more common in southwest England. Their shape is basically ovoid rather than round (see Ballynoe (County Down))

A compartment in a tomb in which burials were placed. In court tombs and wedge tombs a chamber is a sub-division of the burial gallery. Portal tombs have single chambers and passage tombs can have anything from one to five chambers, although usually passage tombs are considered to have a main chamber with extra subsidary chambers.

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Like this monument

Marked Sites

Random Gazetteer

A Selection of Other Wedge Tombs

About Coordinates Displayed

This is an explanation of (and a bit of a disclaimer for) the coordinates I provide.

Where a GPS figure is given this is the master for all other coordinates. According to my Garmin these are quite accurate.

Where there is no GPS figure the 6 figure grid reference is master for the others. This may not be very accurate as it could have come from the OS maps and could have been read by eye. Consequently, all other cordinates are going to have inaccuracies.

The calculation of Longitude and Latitude uses an algorithm that is not 100% accurate. The long/lat figures are used as a basis for calculating the UTM & ITM coordinates. Consequently, UTM & ITM coordinates are slightly out.

UTM is a global coordinate system - Universal Transverse Mercator - that is at the core of the GPS system.

ITM is the new coordinate system - Irish Transverse Mercator - that is more accurate and more GPS friendly than the Irish Grid Reference system. This will be used on the next generation of Irish OS maps.

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