Poulnabrone dolmen

Poulnabrone is a portal tomb standing alone on the bare limestone of the Burren in County Clare — a thin, tilted capstone balanced on slender uprights, framed by grey pavement cut into blocks by deep fissures. It is one of the most photographed prehistoric monuments in Ireland, and it earns the attention: the capstone, close to four metres long but only about thirty centimetres thick, seems to float above the two portal stones, which stand roughly 1.8 metres tall. Around it is the remnant of a low cairn about ten metres across.

The tomb is Neolithic. Excavations led by the archaeologist Ann Lynch in 1986 and 1988 — prompted after a crack was found in the eastern portal stone in 1985 and the stone had to be replaced — produced radiocarbon dates showing that burials took place here roughly between 3800 and 3200 BC. The remains of somewhere around thirty people were recovered from the chamber and from the grikes in the rock beneath it, men and women in roughly equal numbers, many of them children or adolescents, and most of the adults younger than thirty. Their bones carried the marks of hard work, including wear consistent with carrying heavy loads. With them lay a polished stone axe, beads, a bone pendant, quartz crystals and fragments of early Neolithic pottery. Much later, in the Bronze Age, an infant was buried just outside the entrance — a sign that the place still meant something to people living a couple of thousand years after it was built.

Part of Poulnabrone's power is its setting. The Burren is a karst landscape of limestone laid down some 350 million years ago, stripped almost bare and split into clints and grikes where ferns and small flowers shelter. Dozens of other megalithic tombs are scattered across the region, but none sits against the sky quite like this one. Come early or late in the day, when the low light picks out the edges of the stones and the pavement around them, and the tomb looks less like a ruin than like a deliberate sculpture.

Getting there

The dolmen stands beside the R480, the road that crosses the Burren between Ballyvaughan and Leamaneh, with a car park that opened in 2007; a short path leads across the pavement to the tomb. The nearest city is Galway, about 26 km away in a straight line, though the drive around Galway Bay is considerably longer. Shannon Airport (SNN) lies about 41 km to the south.