Location: 3 km (2 mi) East of Carlow (off R726 road) Map
Open: daily
The Browneshill dolmen (also Brownes Hill; Irish Cnoc an Bhrúnaigh)
- officially known as the Kernanstown Portal Tomb - is a Neolithic
portal tomb that dates from 3300 to 2900 BC. was built. The dolmen
is in County Carlow, Ireland, two miles east of Carlow off the R726
(road). Portal tombs are megalithic complexes in the British Isles,
in which two upright stones of equal height with a door stone in
between form the front of a chamber that is covered with a sometimes
enormous capstone.
It has the largest capstone of any
megalithic site in the British Isles. It consists of over 100 tons
of granite and is 4.7 m × 6.1 m in size and about two meters thick.
The cap stone rests in a three-point support on the two portal
stones and a lying end stone. The so-called door stone is still
there and another stone is free in front of the system.
There
are three theories as to how this huge stone was placed in this
position. In all of them, the capstone was found on site and not
transported from further away.
The first theory is that the
builders didn't move the capstone at all. They may have dug holes
individually into which the three supporting stones were placed and
then removed the earth on which the stone lay to produce the
dolmen's appearance as it is today.
Second, the builders could
have set up the three supporting stones and then constructed an
earthen ramp on which the capstone was levered into its current
position using timber.
The third theory is that they levered up
the edge of the capstone. They filled the resulting cavity with
earth and stones and in this way successively built under each of
the three supporting stones.
Flank Stones are occasionally found on one or both
sides in front of the Portal Stones, indicating a simple Court, as some
Court Tombs show. Since Portal Tombs hardly show any trace of a cairn or
mound, more than other types, this part was probably mostly cleared with
the mound. Single flanking stones occur at Menlough, County Galway,
Ireland, and the Tirnony Dolmen, County Londonderry, Northern Ireland,
while at Ahaglaslin, County Cork, low set stones precede both stones of
the portal and further stones form a funnel-shaped entrance. A
crescent-shaped setting of low stones was found at Ticloy, in County
Antrim, Northern Ireland.
Many dolmens were covered with mounds
of earth or stone. There were no traces of that here.