Carrowmore

Spread across the Coolera Peninsula west of Sligo, Carrowmore is one of Ireland's largest and oldest megalithic cemeteries — around thirty surviving tombs out of an original sixty or so, raised some 5,500–6,000 years ago, centuries before Newgrange and the other monuments of Brú na Bóinne. Most are small passage tombs and dolmens ringed by boulder kerbs, clustered around the larger central mound of Listoghil.

Local tradition explains the scattering of so many great stones across the peninsula with a tale told of the Cailleach, the divine hag-figure found across Irish and Scottish folklore: flying from the Ox Mountains toward Knocknarea with a load of boulders gathered in her apron to build a pen for her cattle, she stumbled or dropped her load mid-flight, and where the stones fell to earth, the tombs of Carrowmore now stand.

Carrowmore is also counted among the many leaba Dhiarmada agus Ghráinne — 'beds of Diarmuid and Gráinne' — found across western Ireland, sites where the eloping lovers of the Fenian Cycle are said to have slept on the run from the jealous Fionn mac Cumhaill. More than a hundred such megalithic 'beds' survive, repurposed in oral tradition as resting-places for the famous couple, and at Carrowmore local belief holds that their bones lie among its ancient stones — a much later legend laid over a monument already three thousand years old when the Fianna's stories were first told.