The Knockmany Passage-grave

The following article contains the report from the excavation conducted by A. E. P. Collins and D. M. Waterman in 1951.

Introduction

Knockmany chambered grave is situated on the top of a steep sided conical hill some two miles to the north-west of Augher, Co. Tyrone. It is composed of old Red Sandstone and overlooks the Carboniferous sandstones of the Clogher valley to the south. The hill with a height of 700 feet commands extensive views in all directions.

The site has for long aroused considerable interest among archaeologists on account of the engravings on several of the orthostats of which the burial chamber is built, which connect it and the nearby Sess Kilgreen with the passage grave art of Loughcrew and the Boyne group. The first published plan of the site available is by the Rev. G. Sidney Smith. A sketch of the chamber was provided by W. F. Wakeman in 1876. George Coffey gave a fairly full account of the site in 1898 and re-issued the substance of this paper as Chapter VIII of his New Grange and Other Incised Tumuli of Ireland, 1912. He gives drawings and photographs of the engravings on the faces of two of the stones.

Recently the Government of Northern Ireland took over the hill on which the cairn stands and developed it as a forestry centre. The cairn was then vested in the Ministry of Finance as an Ancient Monument and a protective fence was erected round the burial chamber. This fence needed to be renewed in 1951, and at the direction of the Ministry of Finance we cleared the chamber of under growth and general rubbish and put in a few trial cuttings in the body of the cairn. The plans made as a result of this work are here reproduced by permission of the Ministry of Finance.

The Excavation

In its present state the cairn is an almost circular mound some 80 - 90 feet in diameter, composed of mixed earth and small pieces of rock. The whole of its top has evidently been removed, thus exposing the burial chamber and leaving two deep impressions to the north and south-west of the chamber. Our first cutting, A, was sited to test the nature of the larger of these hollows. At its western end and only just beneath the surface a curved wall-face of rubble in lime mortar was met with, apparently part of a building which had occupied the centre of this hollow. The wall survived to a maximum height of 2 feet 3 inches. At the eastern end of the cutting much loose mortared rubble was also met with, though none of it in situ. Here, then was an explanation for much of the destruction of the top and centre of the cairn. No dating material was found.

As we had anticipated, clearance of brambles and accumulated debris inside the chamber revealed hardly any ancient stratified deposits. Over almost all the floor of the chamber was a confused jumble of earth, broken beer bottles and other modern rubbish, resting on the solid Old Red Sandstone bed-rock. Yet, close against the stones on all sides but the south-east was a thin layer of black earth containing fragments of burnt, presumably human, bone. This penetrated the crevices between the side stones, and there had a thickness of up to 3 or 4 inches. An important structural feature was revealed by the clearance of the chamber: at its southern end were three shallo bed-rock. These are quite evidently sockets which once held the bases of orthostats. Their depths varied from 8 to 11 inches. The remaining undisturbed orthostats were found to be set in exactly similar sockets.

Cutting B was sited to test for the former existence of a stone lined passage leading from the outer edge of the cairn into the chamber. No sign was found of passage stones or of any disturbance caused by their removal. The longitudinal section presented by this cut was of featureles cairn material of small pieces of the local sandstone mixed with earth to a thickness of some two feet, resting on a pre-cairn burnt layer. This consisted of a pinkish-grey deposit, about 4 inches thick, of a sandy texture full of flecks of charcoal and small pebbles. Contained in this layer were 25 pieces of worked flint, all but one of which has been heavily burnt. This deposit rested on bed-rock. A similar material was met with in a small cut made westwards from the chamber into the body of the cairn. Here cairn material rested on the burnt layer, which was rather thinner and more consolidated than in cutting B. The extent of the cairn material in the two small cuttings made outwards from the chamber is indicated by stippling.

A further cutting, C, was made to pick up the original edge of the cairn. This point, marked on the plan by the edge of the stippling, was observed, but no other features or small finds were noted. The Finds. Apart from the fragments of burnt bone, inside the chamber, the only other finds made consisted of worked flints; 25 came from the sub-cairn burnt layer in Cutting B and 4 from the unstratified material inside the chamber.

All but the knife are severely burnt. That they were burnt in situ is indicated by the fact that it has been possible to reassemble six pieces. The material of most is an opaque, pale grey flint. Apart from a broken piece of a core or core-tool all are flakes or flake implements. Those which are indentifiable are illustrated in Fig. 3. Nos. 1 and 2 are all that survives from two large leaf shaped blades, secondarily worked on both faces.

No. 3, a well finished flake-knife with pressure-flaked edge, retains much fresh cortex, suggesting that it is made from fresh Antrim flint, rather than from a drift or beach pebble. The original bulbar end of this flake has been snapped off and the acute angle formed by the intersection of this fracture and the left-hand edge, as seen in the figure, has been blunted .by wear akin to that observed on the tips of flint fabricators. The leaf arrowhead (No. 4), found in two pieces and reassembled, has lost both extre mities. It is pressure flaked over the whole of both faces. A broken piece of a flint saw with very regular teeth is shown in No. 5. The only implement among the flints from the chamber is No. 6, a badly burnt end-scraper.

Discussion

Our recent investigations have done little to strengthen the usual association of Knockmany with the Boyne culture passage-graves. Such a link is, of course, obvious in the similarities between the engravings on stones 2, 4 and 7 of the chamber with those in the Boyne and Lough Crew tombs. Nevertheless, kinship with some of the more degenerate tombs, lacking engraving, of the Carrowmore group has been established on a firmer basis. The stone sockets traced inside the present walls of the chamber, together with Coffey's account of the re-erection of stones 2 and 3, indicate that its present plan is not original. The correct settings of stones 2 and 3 should be in the two stone sockets on that side of the chamber.

The original general plan would thus have been similar to that at Sess Kilgreen, four miles to the north-east. Against this interpretation of stones 1 and 11 must be set their great disparity in size. If one does accept them as portal stones, it is perhaps possible to consider stone 12 as part of a vestigial passage, as in Carrowmore Grave 52 (Wood Martin's numbering).

A distinctly unusual feature of the chamber construction is the radical setting of stones 5 and 9. They seem to serve no structural purpose unless they bond the chamber into the body of the cairn. Very symmetrically disposed, they at first sight seem to suggest the beginnings of blocked side-chambers. But until a more thorough investigation is possible they remain unexplained. It is possible that stone 9 was balanced by another between stones 3 and 4, but the present position of stone 3 makes it difficult to trace if this was so. No interpretation of the recumbent slabs, stones 13 and 14 is offered.

We have made no attempt to discuss the art motifs on stones 2, 4 and 7 as this would involve a re-examination of the whole of Irish passage-grave art. Little further light has been shed on the dating of the chambered grave. The burnt deposit beneath the cairn may possibly be a remnant of a funeral pyre or at least of some rite linked with the cairn, but may pre-date the erection of cairn and chamber by a considerable period. It is noteworthy 'that no trace of burnt bone was seen in this deposit; if a cremation took place, the remains appear to have been very carefully collected. The flints found in this deposit do not help greatly. They all belong to types which, to judge from excavated cairns and occupa tion sites in Ulster, are equally at home in Neolithic and Early Bronze Age contexts.

The date and function of the mortared masonry wall revealed by cutting A remain undetermined. Presumably it formed part of some medieval or later structure, but it is difficult to see what type of building would have been sited on the top of so steep and exposed a hill. So far as is known there are no records of any medieval or later castle on the site. If it represents the remains of a 'folly' or an 18th or early 19th century semaphore tower one would have expected traces to have survived above ground until the 1840's, when the Rev. Sidney Smith made his plan. The presence of this building, incidentally, disposes of Sir Samuel Ferguson's view that the depressions in the cairn mark the site of further cham bers whose stones have been removed.

Source: Knockmany Chambered Grave, Co. Tyrone.