Ballyglass
The Central Court Tomb of Ballyglass ( Irish An Baile Glas ; German "the green place") is located near Ballycastle in County Mayo in Ireland .
Court Tombs or Court Cairns (German court tombs) belong to the megalithic chamber tombs ( English chambered tombs ) of the British Isles . With around 400 specimens, they are found almost exclusively in the north of Ireland or in the province of Ulster in Northern Ireland .
description
The excavations of the Court Tombs took place in 1968 and 1972. The 23 m long structure consists of the concave forecourt, from which a short alley formed by orthostats leads to an approximately six meters wide and ten meters long oval courtyard on the long sides of the oval forms the access to the two opposite galleries, each consisting of two chambers. The galleries are badly damaged, but their layout was secured by the discovery of the stumps of the orthostats. The megalithic complex was enclosed by a double trapezoidal stone mound , the narrow southeastern end of which lies under a nearby road, while the northwestern end has been almost completely eroded. The basal layers of dry stone masonry surrounding the cairn were exposed over long stretches along the south side.
Finds
The 1968 excavation revealed a number of slate and flint cuts along with over 300 chert artifacts . The finds were concentrated outside the southern stone mound and in the northern part of the forecourt. The discovery of traces of a wooden house on and under the stone mound in 1972 required new excavations. They were initially carried out in those areas where the small finds were most concentrated, and later expanded. They led to the discovery of two wooden structures in the area of the impact concentrations. The structures and their surroundings were fully examined.
The part of a roughly rectangular wooden structure ran roughly parallel to the edge of the stone hill. The approximately 6.50 m × 3.0 m measuring structure consisted of a long, irregular wall trench on the south side with short slits at the east and west ends. No wall marks or post holes were found on the north side of the structure. The wall trenches also did not contain post holes, but a series of widely spaced post holes were found along the south inner side and east end of the structure. A three-meter-wide semicircle made up of eight pile holes was found between the west side of the structure and the cairn. Its open side faces the cairn.
The gray, charcoal-rich soil outside and the pits below the cairn vary in thickness between one and ten centimeters, but the exact boundaries were difficult to define. The gray floor did not extend to the structure found in the forecourt. Removal of the topsoil revealed a curved wall trench with an ash-gray filling. At the east and south ends there was a second trench filled with earth and small stones. This 5.5 m long, straight wall trench ran roughly parallel to the northern edge of the forecourt, in a north-south direction. A number of post holes were found in both wall trenches. Inside the structure were additional post holes and several shallow pits.
Some artifacts from fire and chert were found both wooden structures in the wall trenches and some small undecorated shards came from the wall structure outside of Cairns.
The nature of the two wooden structures is unclear, but the large number of artifacts and tees suggest that they were workshops. A number of trenches have been discovered in the rooms of both structures. Their nature or date are unknown, but they cannot be compared with the trenches that were found during the excavation of the other facility in the same area.
Nearby are the Céide Fields and the Doonfeeny Menhir .
See also
literature
- Elizabeth Shee Twohig: Irish Megalithic tombs Princes Risborough Buckinghamshire 1990 ISBN 0-7478-0094-4
- Jürgen E. Walkowitz: The megalithic syndrome. European cult sites of the Stone Age (= contributions to the prehistory and early history of Central Europe. Vol. 36). Beier & Beran, Langenweißbach 2003, ISBN 3-930036-70-3 .
Web links
Coordinates: 54 ° 16 '53.8 " N , 9 ° 23' 10.9" W.