Megalithic Art at Midnight: King’s Mountain, Co. Meath

Down a narrow track off a minor country road, the pillar at King’s Mountain sits upright in a field like a beautifully decorated standing stone. This stone however is quite special, being the solitary remaining roofstone or lintel of a long destroyed passage tomb type monument which had been built around 5,500 years ago. Just five kilometers away is one of Ireland’s greatest passage tomb cemeteries from the Neolithic or Late Stone Age, the Loughcrew complex of decorated chambered tombs. These are also visible against the sky from this spot.  Meath is a relatively low lying county so even though the hills at Loughcrew are not particularly high, they do dominate the lowlands for many miles around.

Though they had been noted by a Miss Beaufort in 1828, the passage tombs at Loughcrew were first formally described by Eugene Conwell in 1864 and presented as ‘The Tomb of Ollamh Fodhla’ in paper read to the Royal Irish Academy in 1872. A cairn is marked near this location on an estate map of 1798. When he visited King’s Mountain, it was sadly just a little too late to record exactly the nature of the monument that stood near this spot:

“On its present site up to a few years ago, stood a tumulus, which the proprietor of the field caused to be carried away for top-dressing; and in the centre of the mound this stone was found, covering in a chamber formed of smaller flagstones and filled with bones, all of which have disappeared, the covering stone alone excepted” (Conwell, E.A. 1872)

The decoration on the bottom three-quarters of one face of the stone consists of spirals of various  sizes with both clockwise and anti-clockwise turns, joined by arcing lines. The dominant spiral has also been enlarged with penannular circles. These have been integrated into one larger design across the face of the stone more consistent with the mature ‘plastic’ style of megalithic art found at the Boyne Valley passage tombs of Newgrange and Knowth than the more haphazard and wonderfully energetic freestyle of depictive art found at the Loughcrew tombs. (Shee Twohig, E. 1981, Herity, M. 1974)

The site is located down a maze of local minor roads, miles from the nearest village or town and is about as good a dark-sky location as anywhere on the east coast on very clear nights. Some light pollution from Oldcastle was dimly visible while I was taking pictures, giving an orange tint to some of the longer exposure photographs. Seeing as it was heading into the St. Patrick’s festival weekend, I thought it would be worth rummaging around the bottom of the camera bag for some Strobist gels to add a festive green tint to the stone, I’m not normally a big fan of using different coloured effects with flash but here’s the slightly more subtle results using a fluorescent correcting light shade of green over the handheld flash unit:

The site is located on private land down a narrow track, see Knowth.com for more information. Click here if you would like to purchase a print, please specify if you would like image 1,2 or 3 from this page.

References:

Conwell, E.A. 1864. On ancient remains, hitherto undescribed, in the County of Meath. Proceedings of the Royal Irish Academy (1st series) 9, 42-50.

Conwell, E.A. 1866. Examination of the ancient sepulchral cairns on the Loughcrew Hills, County of Meath. Proceedings of the Royal Irish Academy (1st series) 9, 355-79.

Conwell, E.A. 1872. On the identification of the ancient cemetery at Loughcrew, Co. Meath; and the discovery of the tomb of Ollamh Fodhla. Proceedings of the Royal Irish Academy (2nd series) 1 (Literature), 72-106.

Herity, M. 1974. Irish passage graves: Neolithic tomb-builders in Ireland and Britain, 2500 BC. Dublin: Irish University Press.

Shee Twohig, E. 1981. The megalithic art of western Europe. Oxford: Clarendon Press