Qualla: Poulnabrone Dolmen

Poulnabrone Dolmen: Introduction

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit User:Serinde, CC BY 2.5. Thirty-six people lie buried here, give or take. Their bones came out in fragments by the thousand, sifted from the crevice beneath the great tilted slab on the Burren's limestone plain. Most of them were dead before they turned thirty. One had a stone arrowhead lodged in the hip - shot from behind, never healed. A six-month-old baby with Down syndrome was laid in among them, the earliest such case archaeologists have ever found, still showing traces of having been breastfed. The dolmen at Poulnabrone has stood over this small Neolithic congregation for almost six thousand years.

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Image: User:Serinde | CC BY 2.5

Poulnabrone Dolmen: Hole of the Quernstone

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Digital Eye, CC BY-SA 4.0. The name comes from Poll na Brón - the genitive of bró, an Irish word for the heavy round stone of a hand-mill. Hole of the Quernstone, more or less, though wishful translators have sometimes rendered it as Hole of Sorrows, which fits the mood better than the etymology. The tomb ...

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Image: Digital Eye | CC BY-SA 4.0

Poulnabrone Dolmen: A Burial Across Generations

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Terryballard, CC BY-SA 2.5. The dating is precise: bodies went into the chamber between 3800 and 3200 BC, across six centuries of use. Six thousand bone fragments came out during the conservation work of 1986 and 1988, when a crack in one portal stone had grown wide enough to threaten the whole structure. D...

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Image: Terryballard | CC BY-SA 2.5

Poulnabrone Dolmen: The Baby in the Stone

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit User Kglavin on en.wikipedia, Public domain. Among the fragments was a child six months old whose skeleton showed the unmistakable markers of Down syndrome - the earliest case yet identified anywhere in the world. The infant had been breastfed. Whoever cared for this baby cared enough to nurse it, and when it died, cared en...

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Image: User Kglavin on en.wikipedia | Public domain

Poulnabrone Dolmen: The Burren Around It

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Frank Chandler, CC BY-SA 4.0. The dolmen stands east of the Poulanine and Glensleade valleys, the rocky hills of Baur and Poulnabrucky rising beyond. To the north-east the land lifts into stepped limestone terraces - the karst that makes the Burren what it is. Approach was difficult when the tomb was built an...

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Image: Frank Chandler | CC BY-SA 4.0

Poulnabrone Dolmen: Still Standing

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Phcostel, CC BY-SA 4.0. Poulnabrone is the largest Irish portal tomb after Brownshill Dolmen down in County Carlow, and far and away the most photographed. Two hundred thousand people came in 2005, the year Clare County Council took stock of the traffic and started building the car park that opened in 2...

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Image: Phcostel | CC BY-SA 4.0