Emily Chan
For almost 200 years, an ancient wedge tomb had been lost to history. The last written record of the tomb was during the 19th century when an English author was visiting Ireland and created a sketch of it.
Now, a local man has rediscovered the prehistoric monument on a hilltop along the southwest coast of Ireland.
Billy Mag Fhloinn, an archaeologist and folklorist at the Sacred Heart University in Dingle, an Irish town, found the 4,000-year-old tomb using a technique called photogrammetry, which consists of digitally piecing together photographs to create a virtual three-dimensional model that can be examined from all angles.
Mag Fhloinn lives below the hill where the structure was found, near a village called Ballyferriter, which is located along the water on the tip of the Dingle Peninsula. For the past few years, he has been investigating the landscape, searching for the long-lost tomb.
The tomb, known locally as the Altóir na Gréine, or sun altar, was said to have been destroyed a few years after it was last seen in 1838 by Georgiana Chatterton, an English author and aristocrat. She noted that it was once used to offer sacrifices to the sun.
However, 14 years later, in 1852, an archaeologist reported that the structure’s stone markers had disappeared. Presumably, someone had carried them away to use them for the construction of a building.
Since then, it was assumed that nothing was there, and the location of the monument was a mystery until Mag Fhloinn’s discovery.
He determined that only one of the ancient stones had remained standing, and an inspection revealed that at least three more large stones were buried underground. The wedge tomb was made in a megalithic style, a category of prehistoric monuments that feature large stones. This type of tomb was common in Ireland at the time.
The style of the tomb indicates that it was from the “Chalcolithic” or Copper Age, a period that occurred in Ireland between 4,500 and 4,000 years ago. During this era, copper was just starting to be used in Ireland.
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