Monamore Chambered Tomb View all content for Monamore

On a hillside amidst vast brutal pine plantations, this chambered cairn stands on a north-south axis. The two portal stones are around 5 feet high and in the Batman ear shape like Aberdeenshire flanker stones, with one of the other frontal stones about 2 feet high beside. The chamber is 10 feet long and about five feet deep, set 2 feet below entrance level so that the chambers would have been half above and half below ground. The vertical divider walls are intact, if heavily mossed and lichened in the damp clean air of this clearing in the forest. There are two of the internal dividing stones recumbent on the floor of the chamber. For all the environmental havoc wrought by pine plantations, there's a sense of stillness here so far from the roads, with the soft rushing of wind in the treetops and the occasional slow creak. The site itself has a tremendous feeling of focus – not dark or spooky in any way, but certainly a jangler of your psyche. Regarding the name Meallach's Grave, which is so official that it appears on the signposts instead of Monamore: Is Meallach a mythical character? Is there any connection with the twin peaks of Holy Island being called Mallach Mor and Mallach Beag ('big Mallach' and 'small Mallach')? Directions: From Lamlash, turn on to the Ross Road. Half a mile from Lamlash, just before the cattle grid and the road goes single-track, there's a place signed 'Forestry Commission Dyemill' with a car park and picnic tables. In there, take the dirt road going straight ahead, not the one to the right. 'Kilmory 9 miles, Whiting Bay 4 and a half miles' says the sign just past the gated roadbridge. You can't drive this dirt road but you can walk or cycle. About half a mile in a green Forestry Commission signpost points off the track to the west, and a couple of hundred metres into the woods there's another one pointing south. Meallach's Grave is in a small clearing about 400m in. Visited 10 June 05

Posted by Merrick 24th November 2005ce

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