Qualla: Coom Wedge Tomb

Coom Wedge Tomb: Introduction

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Commander-pirx, CC BY-SA 4.0. The stone slab that roofs this small chamber has been in place since the Bronze Age. The people who set it there lived between the late Neolithic and the early metal-using world - sometime around 2500 to 2000 BC, give or take a few centuries. They knew how to move stones much heavier than themselves and they knew, evidently, what they wanted those stones to do. They aligned this tomb west to east, opened its entrance to the setting sun, and walked away. What they were thinking about while they worked is gone. The tomb itself, a low spine of granite on a Kerry hillside near the Skellig Ring, is still there.

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Image: Commander-pirx | CC BY-SA 4.0

Coom Wedge Tomb: What a Wedge Tomb Is

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Commander-pirx, CC BY-SA 4.0. Ireland has about four hundred of these structures, more than the rest of Europe combined. They are called wedge tombs because the chamber inside tapers - higher at the front, lower at the back - giving the building a long, thin wedge profile when seen from the side. Archaeologis...

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Image: Commander-pirx | CC BY-SA 4.0

Coom Wedge Tomb: Diarmuid and Grainne's Bed

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Warren.buckley at English Wikipedia, CC BY 2.5. Local memory has a different name for the place. In Irish tradition, it is one of many Leaba Dhiarmada agus Ghrainne - Diarmuid and Grainne's Beds - scattered across the country. The story belongs to the Fenian cycle, the great body of medieval Irish legend that orbits the warrio...

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Image: Warren.buckley at English Wikipedia | CC BY 2.5

Coom Wedge Tomb: The Setting

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Commander-pirx, CC BY-SA 4.0. Coom sits in a townland near the Skellig Ring, the smaller and quieter loop drive that branches off the better-known Ring of Kerry along the southwest of the Iveragh Peninsula. The tomb is not signposted on the main road and not always easy to find without a guide; it stands on p...

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Image: Commander-pirx | CC BY-SA 4.0

Coom Wedge Tomb: What Survives

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Aidannnuigalway, CC BY-SA 4.0. No human remains have been published from Coom, and even where wedge tombs have been excavated in detail, what they have produced is sparing: scatters of cremated bone, sherds of Beaker-period pottery, the occasional flint. The people who built these monuments did not leave writi...

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Image: Aidannnuigalway | CC BY-SA 4.0