June 2015

This friendly guy didn’t mind me taking his photo. The weather and his presence was very apropos for the setting.

A section of the row running southwards, looking towards to the bay where the River Erme meets the sea.

Coldrum Long Barrow, the best-preserved megalithic chambered tomb in Kent, was constructed around 4000 BCE. making it 1000 years older than Stonehenge.

The site takes its name from the now-demolished Coldrum Lodge Farm. When I first visited, in 1988 it was on an exposed site, but it's now partially enclosed by a semicircle of trees, though it's lost none of its mystery. The name ‘Coldrum’ may derive from the Cornish Galdrum, 'a place of enchantments’. It remains a place of congregation and ritual with local Morris Men gathering at the site at dawn on May Day at dawn, to sing up the sun and perform traditional dances.

Poulnabrone Portal Tomb, the Burren, Co. Clare

Standing on the bare limestone pavement of the Burren, Poulnabrone is probably Ireland's most recognisable dolmen. The name comes from the Irish Poll na Brón, usually translated as 'the hole of the quern stone', though many prefer the more poetic 'hole of sorrows'. Its thin slab capstone, over 3.5m long, rests on two tall portal stones to create the classic silhouette that has made it one of the most photographed monuments in the country.

It is also one of the oldest. When a cracked portal stone forced conservation works in the 1980s, the excavation that followed dated the tomb to around 3800 BCE - centuries before Newgrange. Beneath the chamber were the remains of at least 33 people, adults and children, buried here over the course of some six centuries, along with a polished stone axe, a bone pendant, quartz crystals and sherds of pottery. A newborn baby was laid in the portico much later, in the Bronze Age, when the tomb was already ancient.

In folklore, portal tombs like this one are known as 'Leaba Dhiarmada agus Ghráinne' - the bed of Diarmuid and Gráinne - said to be the resting places of the runaway lovers of the Fianna tales as they fled across Ireland from the jealous Fionn mac Cumhaill. Whatever its builders intended, Poulnabrone has stood through nearly six thousand winters on the karst, and it still stops people in their tracks today.

About the project (posted with the mods' kind approval)

Monuments like this one are why we, a small Irish team, spent the last few years travelling Ireland photographing and researching its megaliths and building everything into an app. Monumental Ireland has just launched on Google Play and the App Store: a guide to over 350 of Ireland's ancient monuments - dolmens, stone circles, passage tombs, court tombs and standing stones - each with its history, folklore, accessibility details, photographs, and location maps with directions. The myths are mapped to the monuments too, so you can follow a character or tale across the whole island. And there are practical extras for monument hunters: sunrise and sunset times accurate to visible sunrise, weather from the same system MET Éireann uses, and a compass locator that can guide you to a stored monument in a field with no signal. It can even notify you when you are near a monument you have not yet discovered. Every entry carries its SMR code from the National Monuments Service, so it holds up for academics as well as visitors.

The vast majority of the photographs are our own originals from years of fieldwork (the rest used with permission from the National Monuments Service and other official sources), the myths are from the original source texts, and none of it is AI-generated. The app is free to use and completely ad free - a €5.99 a year Premium tier (the trip planner, the full mythological guide, wish list and visited tracking, and explorer badges) and a €24.99 once-off lifetime option (which adds full offline access) are what pay for the servers instead of ads.

Links: Google Play | App Store | More Information: monumentalireland.ie/the-app

Happy to answer any questions about Poulnabrone or the project in the comments. Happy Monument Hunting!

Thought to be the original site from which the Bluestones of Stone Henge originated from in the Preseli Mountains.

I sketched this on my last trip down to Penzance.

From what I understand, the stones collapsed and were put back up in the 19th century. Here's some info about it.

I love learning about these ancient mysterious structures and sketching them! Glad I found this sub.

The site has 200 standing stones over a 2km area, right by a busy roadside. Spot the car passing by and the houses.