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Court Tomb
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I had an appointment in a hotel in Letterkenny and it finished earlier than I had expected. Usually if I'm traveling that far I'll have done an itinerary and have my maps with me, but as I thought I'd be in the hotel until nightfall, I hadn't bothered. Now I had about 2 and a half hours of daylight to spare so I typed in Drumskinny stone circle into Google Maps and headed off. It was 50 minutes away and was going to add 30 minutes to my three hour journey home but what the hell.
I headed out the Letterkenny to Ballybofey road but was traveling almost blind as I'd never been in this part of the country. I kept pretty much to the GM directions but peered over any hedgerows I could to see if there were any wayward sites. After about 25 minutes and heading downhill towards some forestry I noticed a bunch of upright stones beside a field wall about 50 metres into a field on my left. I was fairly moving it but jammed on a bit past and out of sight of the site. The speed limit sign I parked beside was in mph and as I left the car and headed back, there was one in kph – I was right on the border.
The border-line runs right through this tomb. It is not mentioned in the Survey of the Megalithic Tombs of Ireland, Vol. VI, County Donegal but is mentioned in the Archaeological Inventory of County Donegal. It is very much a court tomb and is a wrecked mess that could do with a bit of tidying up. The remains of the court lie mostly in Donegal but most of the tomb, with an ante-chamber, a full chamber entranced through a classic pair of jambstones and a completely destroyed sub-chamber are in Tyrone. Indeed, the only online mention I can find for this calls it Garvagh, and places it in that townland in Tyrone. It's mentioned in the inventory section of Tomb Travel, the Northern Ireland Environment Agency SMR number TYR 015:005.
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Posted by ryaner
14th October 2018ce
Edited 23rd October 2018ce
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