I know I'm not alone in my love for Ireland's ancient megalithic tombs and sites, so I have mapped all recorded sites across the whole of Ireland. Data for Northern Ireland doesn't provide categories, but you can see the overall distribution. For the Republic, I've included the breakdowns provided by the NMS.

The map combines historical monument data from the National Monument Service (NMS) of Ireland with the Department for Communities historical monument data. I cleaned the data sources up with some basic transformation in PowerQuery and then used QGIS to visualise (I'm slowly learning how to do this!).

There's obviously a few trends you can see from the data, particularly the concentrations of Wedge and Boulder Tombs in the south west. I'm sure you can spot many more that I wouldn't notice too.

I previously mapped Ogham Stones and Stone Circles.

Any thoughts about the map or data insights would be very welcome.

Posted by Sarquin

5 comments

  1. For those who want to see the data sources check out NMS here [https://www.archaeology.ie/collections-and-publications/publications/monument-class-and-scope-notes/](https://www.archaeology.ie/collections-and-publications/publications/monument-class-and-scope-notes/) and the UK Open Data here [https://www.data.gov.uk/dataset/46240fa5-db15-469e-b1c8-0460504b951c/northern-ireland-sites-and-monuments-record](https://www.data.gov.uk/dataset/46240fa5-db15-469e-b1c8-0460504b951c/northern-ireland-sites-and-monuments-record) For the tooling, I used QGIS and PowerQuery (Excel).

    If you want to see my own analysis of the distributions and more detailed maps of each megalithic category, please see here: [https://www.danielkirkpatrick.co.uk/irish-history/megalithic-map-of-ireland/](https://www.danielkirkpatrick.co.uk/irish-history/megalithic-map-of-ireland/) Apologies – I did get carried away and fell down a deep rabbit hole of map-making!

  2. This map makes me wonder if the gaps in the east are due to less activity in the neolithic or if they are because of “current” factors that make it harder to find these tombs and sites. Like them being destroyed from civilisations in the last 1000 years, people building on top of them or more cultivation of fields and so on.

  4. Looks like ancient Ireland had more stones than a rock concert! 😂 Seriously though, you could basically tour the country just hopping from one megalithic site to another. Ireland’s ancient GPS – powered by stones.

  5. What is Fort Navan classified as on here? It’s the only one I’ve ever been to and it was v interesting about how a barbary ape skull was discovered there, but I’m not sure how it would be classified according to this.

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