Qualla: Carrowkeel Megalithic Cemetery

Carrowkeel Megalithic Cemetery: Introduction

Sat, 14 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit kevin higgins, CC BY-SA 2.0. "I lit three candles and stood awhile, to let my eyes accustom themselves to the dim light." So wrote the naturalist Robert Lloyd Praeger in 1911, describing his first entry into a chamber at Carrowkeel that had not been opened in thousands of years. "There was everything, just as the last man had left it, three to four thousand years before. A light brownish dust covered all... beads of stone, bone implements made from Red Deer antlers, and many fragments of much decayed pottery. On little raised recesses in the wall were flat stones, on which reposed the calcinated bones of young children." Five thousand years of silence, ended by three candle flames.

Image: kevin higgins | CC BY-SA 2.0

Carrowkeel Megalithic Cemetery: The Speckled Hills

Sat, 14 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Ediscover.eu, CC BY-SA 4.0. Carrowkeel occupies the high ground of the Bricklieve Mountains -- An Bricshliabh, "the speckled hills" -- overlooking the dark waters of Lough Arrow in south County Sligo. Fourteen passage tombs form the central core of the complex, with twelve more scattered within a six-kilome...

Image: Ediscover.eu | CC BY-SA 4.0

Carrowkeel Megalithic Cemetery: Origins Written in Bone

Sat, 14 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit kevin higgins, CC BY-SA 2.0. The 1911 excavation, led by R.A.S. Macalister with Praeger and Edmund Clarence Richard Armstrong, unearthed cremated human remains, animal bones, tools, and a distinctive crude pottery that became known as Carrowkeel Ware -- the first type specimen of its kind recorded from Irish...

Image: kevin higgins | CC BY-SA 2.0

Carrowkeel Megalithic Cemetery: Gods and Demons

Sat, 14 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Shane Finan, CC BY-SA 4.0. Mythology saturates this landscape. Heapstown Cairn, the massive passage tomb at the northern end of Lough Arrow, stands on the legendary plain of Moytura -- the site of battles between the Tuatha De Danann, the ancient gods of Ireland, and the demonic Fomorians. The nearby Caves...

Image: Shane Finan | CC BY-SA 4.0

Carrowkeel Megalithic Cemetery: Fragile Stones

Sat, 14 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Shane Finan, CC BY-SA 4.0. Some of the Carrowkeel tombs can still be entered by crawling through a narrow passage into a corbelled chamber. The experience is visceral -- the weight of stone above, the darkness, the sense of being inside something immeasurably old. But the monuments are under threat. Visito...

Image: Shane Finan | CC BY-SA 4.0