Qualla: Audleystown Court Tomb

Audleystown Court Tomb: Introduction

Wed, 27 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Eric Jones, CC BY-SA 2.0. Thirty-four people lie at Audleystown, or rather, the bones of thirty-four people, found together in the burial chambers and described by the archaeologist who excavated them in 1952 as primarily women and children, mostly defleshed, mostly unburnt, lifted apart and put down again in pieces. This is not how the Neolithic farmers of the Strangford shore disposed of their dead by accident. The Audleystown court tomb is one of the earliest works of architecture in Ireland. It is older than the pyramids by a thousand years. The people whose bones it holds were our European ancestors at the moment they stopped following the herds and learned to plant grain, and what they built for their dead is still here.

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Image: Eric Jones | CC BY-SA 2.0

Audleystown Court Tomb: What a Court Tomb Is

Wed, 27 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Eric Jones, CC BY-SA 2.0. Between roughly 3900 and 3500 BCE, the farming communities of the northern Irish Sea built more than 390 court cairns in Ireland and another hundred in southwest Scotland. They are the earliest megalithic monuments these islands knew, older than the passage tombs of the Boyne val...

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Image: Eric Jones | CC BY-SA 2.0

Audleystown Court Tomb: The 1952 Excavation

Wed, 27 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Ardfern, CC BY-SA 3.0. Audleystown was first excavated by the archaeologist A.E.P. 'Pat' Collins in 1952, as part of the Archaeological Survey of Northern Ireland. Collins published his findings in 1954, the Ministry of Finance took the site into guardianship as an ancient monument, and the burial gall...

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Image: Ardfern | CC BY-SA 3.0

Audleystown Court Tomb: Rebuilding the Cairn

Wed, 27 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Ardfern, CC BY-SA 3.0. In 1958 Collins came back to Audleystown with a small team to consolidate what he had found. The work was both archaeology and architecture. The courts were taken down to their original ground level. A search of the nearby fields turned up several large Silurian slabs, the local ...

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Image: Ardfern | CC BY-SA 3.0

Audleystown Court Tomb: The Long Memory of the Shore

Wed, 27 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit John Smith, CC BY-SA 2.0. From the cairn the land falls away gently to the southern shore of Strangford Lough, perhaps half a mile distant, the same shore the Neolithic farmers used for shellfish and for travel. The view westward across Ballyculter parish is open enough that the placement of the tomb feel...

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Image: John Smith | CC BY-SA 2.0