What is recorded here

Carnaghan Cist and Standing Stones is a chamber tomb on Inch Island in Lough Swilly, where two tall portal-stones and a low backstone mark a small chamber buried beneath a grassy mound. It overlookes the inner reaches of the lough from a south-facing slope, placing the dead between pasture, rock and water. The chamber is tiny compared with the reach of the view, as if the living were expected to look outward while the dead remained held in a narrow stone room.

This monument is on Inch Island in Lough Swilly. It stands on a terrace on the S-facing slope of Inch Top and overlooks the inner reaches of the lough. Fair pasture in the vicinity of the site gives way, closeby to the N, to rougher ground broken by occasional rock outcrops. The tomb now consists of two tall portal-stones at the NE and, 2.5m to the SW, a low backstone. Approximately 0.7m NW of the backstone is a cist covered by two superimposed slabs, and 0.5m E of the cist a slab rests in a horizontal position on four low stones. These features stand in a low grassy mound, subrectangular in outline, measuring 10.4m N-S by 10m E-W. A hedge-grown wall runs along the western edge of the mound. There is a facing of dry-walling along the southern half of the eastern edge of the mound. The wall and facing are relatively modern features. The mound is 0.7m high at the dry-walling and 0.4m high elsewhere. There were three mature trees at the northern edge of the mound and two at the S in 1982 when the tomb was surveyed.

A Bronze Age cist and standing stones; significant as a rare survival of a funerary and ritual monument in a coastal lacustrine setting.

The monument record does not grant public access. Check the route and ask the landowner before entering private land.