Carrowmore

One of Ireland's oldest and largest megalithic cemeteries, built by Neolithic farmers from Anatolia, at the heart of a sacred landscape connecting Knocknarea, Carrowkeel, and the mythology of the Cailleach.

The Cailleach, the divine crone goddess of Irish mythology, flew over the region from the Ox Mountains toward Knocknarea. She carried stones in her apron to build a pen for her animals. But the apron string broke, or she grew careless, and the stones scattered across the landscape below. Where they fell, the megalithic tombs of Carrowmore stand.

Archaeology tells a different story, no less remarkable. Between approximately 3800 and 3000 BC, Neolithic farming communities built a cemetery of sixty or more monuments on the Coolera Peninsula. DNA analysis suggests the builders were colonists whose ancestors had migrated from Anatolia around 8500 BC, travelling through continental Europe and arriving in Ireland via Brittany. They brought a tradition of megalithic construction that they adapted to local materials, using the glacial erratics deposited across the landscape by retreating ice sheets as the building blocks of their tombs.

The cemetery is also associated with the Battle of Moytura, one of the founding myths of Irish mythology, in which the Tuatha De Danann defeated the Firbolgs for control of Ireland. The battle is traditionally located in the Sligo region, and the scattered monuments of Carrowmore and the surrounding landscape are sometimes interpreted as the physical remnants of this mythological conflict.