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Ballylumford ‘dolmen’ is well signposted at the junction of the main A2 Belfast to Larne road and the causeway road across the southern end of Lough Larne on to the peninsula of Islandmagee. After that, you’re practically on your own for the 9 kilometres you must travel until you nearly drive into the tomb.

Roadside tombs and megalithics are great but this is ridiculous. It’s also very wonderful. The adjacent house seems to be empty, possibly abandoned by the residents who seem to have retreated to the rear of the building in reverence and out of respect. Or maybe not. I knew this was close to the road but I wasn’t expecting just how close. I’d also expected to have to knock at the house – not a bit of it. There’s a car-park right beside the monument and we appreciated the “go ahead” we received on asking permission to park from one of the locals.

The stones of the chamber of this passage tomb are all substantial. I found it hard to examine it too closely, caught up the whole drama of it. Taking a photo of the south-west side could be hazardous as you step back into the road. On our visit it was very quiet, no cars passed by in the 20 minutes we spent there. As you can imagine, views are mostly blocked, but I did notice, way away to the north-north-west beyond the side of the house, the bulk of the south end of the Mull of Kintyre, an added bonus on a sun-filled visit.

The tiny hamlet of Roughfort lies just south of the old Antrim Road and its replacement, the M2 Belfast to Derry road. It’s a quiet, sleepy, semi-rural, middle class idyll with a quite amazing, one-off ‘passage tomb’ called variously Carn Greine, Carngraney, Granny’s Grave or Graina’s Grave, all widely regarded to be derivations of Carn na Gréine, the cairn of the sun.

Easily accessed over the field gate, we asked permission of the folk in the house opposite to park in their driveway – this duly granted we vaulted the gate and headed down. When Fourwinds visited prior to the publication in 2008 of his Monu-Mental About Prehistoric Antrim he found the tomb badly overgrown with brambles, in danger of being swallowed completely. Thankfully this has changed and, since david’s visit in 2024, improved even more. The grass in the field is now a lush green, possibly soon to be used for grazing – mid-May is a good time to visit.

I’ve never seen anything quite like Carn na Gréine. Closest in similarity on the island to the Tramore group of passage tombs, as Fourwind’s says, I think this site even defies that comparison. The way it declines in height from the south-east down to the north-west tail-end; the sealed nature of each of what were mini-chambers and the discovery of human remains under each roofstone, seems to make this a truly one-off, not a passage tomb, nor a wedge tomb as it is sometimes called.

It lies there, much like a massive caterpillar, slouched down into the ground with an almost bulbous head at the top end – a sealed chamber of six stones supporting a large capstone to a height of about 2 metres. From there, it gradually diminishes in height until the last stone at the far end which lies unsupported on the ground. From either side it gives the impression of movement, sluggishly making its way up the slope on which it is sited. Well not really, but you have to allow for flights of the imagination here at the cairn of the sun. Fantastic.

In the hills north-west above Belfast, at the end of the urban part of the Crumlin Road where the city runs out, lie the remains of Ballyutoag court tomb. It’s marked on the OS map as a cairn, probably because its excavator named it the Hanging Thorn Cairn. Some of the surrounding terrain has the blasted look that many areas so close to the city have – trashed old machinery and rubble, half wasteland, half dustbin. There’s wide open green spaces too but with a slight feel that you’re on your way to somewhere else, away from the iron giants that maraud over the landscape and the raucousness of the city, but just haven’t made it yet.

The fence lines around here are taut, unforgiving. Fortunately enough the monument is only about 50 metres from the road and there’s an easy enough point to traverse the barbed wire without endangering yourself. An ancient wall runs right down to the fence – this wall and bank seems to be an old dividing boundary and it runs right across the front of the forecourt of Ballyutoag. This forecourt is all that remains here, bar a few embedded possible chamber stones that seem to be in line with the entrance jambs.

There is a prehistoric sense here – this would have been a fine megalith before the gallery was pulled asunder. Facing out of the court from between the jambstones/portals, the construction, especially of the two massive opposing boulders two stones into the forecourt, looks robust and would have taken a serious and time-consuming effort. We didn’t really hang around, on the way to the sun cairn up the road, but it was worth checking out, imagining what once was and witnessing what remains.

I’ve been in the vicinity of Birrinagh (Biorainneach – abounding in coarse grass?) on a few previous occasions and never visited it. Like Drumhart earlier in the day, it’s not a widely known megalith, though there are some photos of it on the ‘net. It is marked on the OS map but isn’t in the Survey of Megalithic Tombs of Ireland. This series, whose publishing began in 1961, is still incomplete, though county Longford was covered in a 1972 volume with the omission of Birrinagh. Strange.

Spotting the tomb in the field below us as we pulled in at the farmhouse at the end of the cul de sac, we knocked and asked permission to head down. The gentleman farmer was very friendly and freely passed on some other, unconnected information that had me and my mate slightly flabbergasted. He was more than happy to allow us to visit the monument.

The stones look very rough hewn. Five remain – both portals, a three-quarter height doorstone, a backstone and the slipped capstone. There are no sidestones but the chamber continues to have that box-like feel found at many small portal tombs. The surrounding terrain is wide open, low hills surround the massive pasture field in which it lies. It’s maybe for the completists only – the megalithic wonders at Cleenrah and Aghnacliff are only about 7 kilometres to the south, but the rewards here are sufficient for the melancholic and pensive stone hunter.

Roughly six kilometres south-west of the green and lovely lanes of Killashandra is the dual-court tomb of Drumhart. Its relative isolation means that it is so rarely visited that I couldn’t find any photos of it online. Anthony Weir mentions it at irishmegaliths.org.uk. It has a brief entry in the archaeological inventory of Co. Cavan, culled from the more extensive entry in the Survey of Megalithic Tombs of Ireland Volume III, published in 1972, including a precise plan but minus the usual photo/plate. This last is probably due to the fact that when they visited it, de Valera and Ó’Nualláin report that “The monument is very heavily overgrown.” Not any more.

Fourwinds, who created the original site post here, gave it the designation of ‘chambered tomb’. He’s not wrong – but a more satisfying category would be the obvious court tomb. I can’t check what he has it as on his megalithomania.com site as this hasn’t been accessible for quite a few years now, a huge loss to the Irish stone hunter community. Ah well.

The people on whose land the monument lies are lovely. They were more than happy to allow us to head down into the little glade for a butcher’s. The tomb is in quite a ruinous state, neither end having much of a court left – the western the better of the two, the eastern non-existent. In fact all that remains of the eastern tomb is the box-like first chamber and its jambstones. This has been colonised by a thorn tree but is quite distinct with the the sidestones roughly half a metre high and the chamber itself 4 metres long.

The western tomb is the more interesting, with a roughly 10 metre long, three-chambered gallery and some scant remnants of a court. None of the chamber stones, except the entrance jambs and some of the first chamber, rise much above the surrounding turf, and the floor of the whole gallery is filled with soil and is grassed over. Its current condition leaves one wondering was it every accessible post-construction, or was it closed off after it was roofed over and embedded in its cairn. Certainly you would have had to be quite tiny indeed to be able to enter the tomb.

There’s a couple more anomalies at Drumhart – the two tombs, though generally east-west pointing, are not aligned. The remains of the eastern tomb may, according to de Valera and Ó’Nualláin, be the second or third chamber of a three-chambered gallery and what I took to be entrance jambs could be segmenting stones, though the archaeologists do settle on it being the first chamber. Either way, a continuation of a line straight through the middle of this chamber would not hit the imagined backstone of the western chamber but miss it by a couple of metres to the north. There’s also what I thought to be a subsidiary chamber, south-east of the end of the western tomb. It’s possible that the lads missed this due to its overgrown state on their visit, though there is one set stone in the correct position on their plan.

We passed a while here, snooping around and up onto the rocky outcrop west of the tomb. It’s secluded, and peaceful and not yet overgrown. It’s marked on the OS map and the landowners said that they get a visitor maybe once a year. It’s not on the way anywhere spectacular but is well worth a visit if you find yourself in the locale.