Qualla: Carrowmore

Carrowmore: Introduction

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit CC BY-SA 3.0. The dolmens at Carrowmore were already eight hundred years old when the first stones of Newgrange were laid. They were two thousand years old when the Great Pyramid of Giza was built. The thirty surviving monuments on this small plateau outside Sligo date roughly to between 3750 BC and 3000 BC, making Carrowmore one of the oldest known megalithic cemeteries in Europe. The people who raised these stones were among the first farmers on the island - descendants, ancient DNA now tells us, of a great wave of Neolithic farmers whose origin lay in Anatolia. They brought wheat, cattle, and a religion of stone. Then they buried their dead beneath the same boulders they had hauled across this plateau, and watched the rising moon do whatever it was meant to do over the central cairn.

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Image: CC BY-SA 3.0

Carrowmore: The Great Quarter

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Gillaween, CC BY-SA 4.0. Carrowmore - Ceathru Mhor in Irish, the great quarter - sits on a low plateau at thirty-six to fifty-nine metres above sea level on the Coolera Peninsula west of Sligo town. Thirty monuments survive today. Another twenty-five have been destroyed since 1800 by quarrying and field ...

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Image: Gillaween | CC BY-SA 4.0

Carrowmore: Listoghil

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Brholden, Public domain. At the high point of the plateau stands Listoghil, also called Tomb 51, the only cairn-covered monument in the cemetery. Erected around 3500 BC, it is thirty-four metres across with a distinctive box-like central chamber. The leading edge of the entrance stone bears engraved mark...

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Image: Brholden | Public domain

Carrowmore: Knocknarea

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Gordon Hatton, CC BY-SA 2.0. Five kilometres to the west of Carrowmore rises the mountain of Knocknarea, a flat-topped limestone hill 327 metres above the sea. On its summit sits a gigantic cairn called Miosgan Medhbh - Maeve's Pile - a great unopened mound of stone that has never been excavated. Tradition a...

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Image: Gordon Hatton | CC BY-SA 2.0

Carrowmore: The Dynastic Lineage

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Geofreund1, CC BY-SA 4.0. In 2020, geneticists working on ancient DNA from Irish Neolithic burials made a striking discovery. A man buried in Listoghil at Carrowmore shared detectable kinship with three other individuals buried at Newgrange, at Millin Bay, and at Carrowkeel - the great megalithic sites sc...

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Image: Geofreund1 | CC BY-SA 4.0

Carrowmore: The Dump and the Architectural Landscape

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit The.Q, CC BY-SA 3.0. In 1983, Sligo County Council proposed to put a municipal landfill on a quarry site about a hundred yards from part of the Carrowmore complex. Five local residents took the case to court. The High Court ruled for the council. The Supreme Court, in 1989, reversed the decision. The...

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Image: The.Q | CC BY-SA 3.0