Ballymacdermot Court Tomb
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Ballymacdermot Court Tomb is a megalithic
portal tomb A dolmen () or portal tomb is a type of single-chamber megalithic tomb, usually consisting of two or more upright megaliths supporting a large flat horizontal capstone or "table". Most date from the early Neolithic (40003000 BCE) and were som ...
on Ballymacdermot Mountain in
County Armagh County Armagh (, named after its county town, Armagh) is one of the six counties of Northern Ireland and one of the traditional thirty-two counties of Ireland. Adjoined to the southern shore of Lough Neagh, the county covers an area of an ...
, two miles outside
Newry Newry (; ) is a City status in Ireland, city in Northern Ireland, divided by the Newry River, Clanrye river in counties County Armagh, Armagh and County Down, Down, from Belfast and from Dublin. It had a population of 26,967 in 2011. Newry ...
. The site is a scheduled monument in State care. The site dates from between 4000 and 2500
BCE Common Era (CE) and Before the Common Era (BCE) are year notations for the Gregorian calendar (and its predecessor, the Julian calendar), the world's most widely used calendar era. Common Era and Before the Common Era are alternatives to the or ...
and is located close to other neolithic monuments such as Ballykeel Dolmen and Clontigora Cairn.


Excavations

The
tomb A tomb ( grc-gre, τύμβος ''tumbos'') is a repository for the remains of the dead. It is generally any structurally enclosed interment space or burial chamber, of varying sizes. Placing a corpse into a tomb can be called ''immureme ...
was excavated in 1816 by John Bell of the nearby Killevy Castle, in conjunction with the landowner, Jonathon Seavers. They reported to the Newry Magazine that they had found an urn containing pulverized bone fragments. It was again excavated in 1962 by A. E. P. Collins and B. Wilson who discovered evidence of human cremations, flint, and ceramics. The archaeologists also discovered that some of the stones had been significantly disturbed in recent years. Local people told the survey team that this was as a result of an encounter with a U.S. Army tank during the Second World War.


References

{{Places of Interest in County Armagh Archaeological sites in County Armagh Dolmens in Northern Ireland