Qualla: Altar Wedge Tomb

Altar Wedge Tomb: Introduction

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Lukeoc88, CC BY-SA 4.0. Pull a slab of stone out of the heather, line up three more, and put a roof-stone over the top - that is the basic recipe for an Irish wedge tomb, and the country has hundreds of them. The Altar Wedge Tomb is one of the smaller ones. It crouches on a cliff edge above Toormore Bay, 6.7 kilometres west-southwest of the village of Schull, its trapezoidal stone gallery just three metres long. But the Altar carries an extra story that most of its cousins do not - it became, four thousand years after it was built, a place where outlawed Catholics gathered for Mass in the woods.

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Image: Lukeoc88 | CC BY-SA 4.0

Altar Wedge Tomb: Built for the Dead, c. 2500-2000 BC

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Slongy, CC BY 4.0. Wedge tombs were the last great megalithic burial form in Ireland, built in the late Neolithic and early Bronze Age - roughly 2500 to 2000 BC. They are called wedge tombs because the gallery widens at one end and narrows at the other, like a doorstop laid on its side. The Altar's...

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Image: Slongy | CC BY 4.0

Altar Wedge Tomb: An Alignment to the Setting Sun

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Mac McCarron, CC BY-SA 2.0. The entrance is aligned roughly east-northeast to west-southwest. Look out through the open gallery and the line points toward Mizen Peak, called in Irish Carn Ui Neit - the cairn of Net, a figure from Irish mythology. The same line catches the setting sun at Samhain, the festiva...

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Image: Mac McCarron | CC BY-SA 2.0

Altar Wedge Tomb: Mass Rock

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit D.Camier, CC BY-SA 4.0. Then the tomb's story shifts entirely. After the English Reformation and especially during the 18th-century penal era in Ireland - the period when the Penal Laws restricted Catholic worship, property ownership, and political participation - Irish Catholics could not legally hold ...

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Image: D.Camier | CC BY-SA 4.0

Altar Wedge Tomb: What Remains, and What Was Carried Off

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Dr Brian Lynch, CC BY-SA 2.0. Today the Altar is a national monument, protected and kept. The cairn that once covered the chamber is gone, recycled into 19th-century road metal, and the kerbstones that would have edged it have vanished the same way. What is left is the essential armature - three slabs of orth...

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Image: Dr Brian Lynch | CC BY-SA 2.0