The Slieve Gullion Passage Tomb, located in the Northern Ireland village of Killeavy, is currently closed amid the ongoing maintenance
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NEED TO KNOW
- A team of workers has been hiking daily up to the summit of a 1,800-foot mountain in Northern Ireland to repair a 5,000-year-old tomb
- The Slieve Gullion Passage Tomb, located in the village of Killeavy in County Armagh, is currently closed amid the ongoing maintenance
- The repair work on the tomb — which looks like a large mound of loose rocks on top of the mountain, with a small entry point — is expected to be finished by Dec. 21
A team including archaeologists and engineers has been hiking up a 1,800-foot mountain in Northern Ireland daily in an attempt to repair a 5,000-year-old tomb at the summit.
The Slieve Gullion Passage Tomb, located in the village of Killeavy in County Armagh, is currently being restored after the chamber’s roof became dangerously corroded, per the BBC.
“The chamber of the Southern Cairn on the summit of Slieve Gullion (known locally as Cailleach Beara’s House) is closed (until further notice) for essential maintenance,” a message on a local tourist site states.
Local archaeologist Stuart Alexander — who works for the country’s Historic Environment Division — told the BBC, “Last year we unfortunately had to close it because we had an engineering report that said that the roof that had been installed in the 1960s had become so corroded and dangerous that it was close to failure.”
“We’ve been working for the past year, planning so we could get up here to get this new roof put on,” he added, per the outlet.
Credit: Alamy
Some of the materials for the repair work are brought to the tomb via helicopter. However, the majority has to be carried up the mountain every day, the BBC reported. The hike up to the summit is approximately 40 minutes from the mountain’s highest parking lot.
The repair work on the tomb — which looks like a large mound of loose rocks on top of the mountain, with a small entry point — is expected to be finished by Dec. 21.
Local blacksmith apprentice Lucas Adams, who has also been working on the project, told the BBC, “It’s very satisfying being able to go around the country and do a certain type of work in all of these ancient places.”
“We had to replace the roof. All the steel beams had been corroded. So it needed four new steel beams with new plates and a new cage for light to come in,” he added to the outlet.
Credit: Alamy
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Ecological permissions have had to be secured from the country’s Department of Agriculture, Environment and Rural Affairs (DAERA), given that the tomb is located in an Area of Special Scientific Interest (ASSI), the BBC noted.
Project manager Owen Mort told the outlet of testing the new roof, “A number of cracks had developed (over the years) so what we’ve been doing throughout the project is monitoring whether any movement has been taking place.”
A device called a tell-tale has been helping the team detect any movement and make sure that any cracks haven’t opened up further, per the outlet.
Slieve Gullion Passage Tomb is “dramatically situated on the southern end of the Slieve Gullion summit ridge” and “is the highest surviving passage tomb in in the British Isles with stunning views over the surrounding countryside,” per the local tourism site.
“Known locally as ‘Cailleach Beara’s House’ it consists of a circular cairn [around 98 feet] in diameter and up to [around 13 feet] high, with a kerb of massive, but undecorated, stones around the perimeter,” the site adds.
“A slight indentation on the south-west marks the entrance to a short, [linteled], passage which leads to the octagonal, originally [corbeled], chamber,” it continues.
The earliest documented investigation of Slieve Gullion Passage Tomb dates back to 1789, “when the chamber was opened by locals searching for the old lady or Cailleach Beara, but only a few human bones were found,” the site states, referring to the mythic Irish goddess.
Excavation in 1961 then revealed that the chamber had been “badly disturbed,” with only a few pieces of worked flint, a single scraper and an arrowhead being found.
“Two of the stone basins, commonly found in passage tombs, were also discovered below modern fill in the chamber and a third (now housed in Armagh County Museum) was recovered from the outer end of the passage,” per the website.
It states that excavation also revealed that a small cairn of stones, around 39 feet in diameter, had been added to the northern side of the tomb.
“Although no burials or structural features were uncovered by the excavation, it seems reasonable to interpret this as a Bronze Age addition,” the site says. “A small round cairn on the northern end of the summit ridge was also excavated in 1961 revealing two small cist graves and fragments of distinctive Early Bronze Age pottery.”
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