Bavan Court Tomb / Dermot and Gráinne's Bed

This excavated monument is c. 7km W of Killybegs. It stands at the head of a rocky, bog-grown valley and overlooks two other excavated court tombs Shalwy (Dg. 113), 400m to the SW, and Croaghbeg (Dg. 40), a further 200m to the SW. The last is c. 300m from a small sandy beach on the N side of Donegal Bay, across which there is an extensive outlook to the north Connacht coastline. Ten stones stood here, and others lay prostrate when Thomas Fagan (1845-8) visited the monument in 1847, but by the mid-20th century only six orthostats were visible (de Valera 1960). The excavation, conducted over two seasons in 1964 and 1965 (Flanagan and Flanagan 1966), revealed much of the ground plan of the monument. This showed an oval full court, at the SE, leading to a gallery divided by jambs into two chambers. The structure stood in a cairn delimited by a revetment of drystone-walling. The plan published here is based on the excavators' plan (Flanagan and Flanagan 1966). The stones shown hatched thereon are those still extant. Excavation showed that the cairn had been levelled, apparently deliberately, but the basal layer of its dry-wall revetment, in which outcrops of rock had been incorporated, was found to have survived largely intact. Some of the stones in this layer were extremely small, and none rose more than 0.2m above original ground level. A spread of cairn material beyond the revetment was, in the opinion of the excavators, due either to primary collapse or to the later levelling of the cairn. The revetment delimited a cairn 19m long. The cairn was 10-11m wide for the greater part, but it narrowed to front and back, although the precise outline at the back was not apparent. On the basis of the configuration of the collapsed cairn material at the NW comer, the excavators postulated that the cairn edge here would have been c. 1m high and composed of at least seven courses of dry-walling. The cairn, of local quartzite rubble, had been carefully built in places. The excavators cite the example of the deliberate placing of large 'key-stones' immediately N of the front chamber of the gallery to anchor the cairn body. At other points, however, the cairn stones appear simply to have been dumped. Access to the court was via an entrance passage c. 2m long and 1.2m wide in the front of the cairn. Low stones formed the sides of the passage, which had been blocked with large stones (Flanagan and Flanagan 1966, 33). The oval court was c. 6m long and 5m wide. An arc of five orthostats forms its inner end. Two of these, 0.55m apart, served as the entrance jambs to the gallery. The northern one is 0.6m high, and the southern one 1m high. Two courtstones flank the northern jamb. That adjoining the jamb is 0.9m high, and the other is 0.7m high. The single orthostat flanking the southern jamb is 0.8m high. Beyond the arc of these five stones excavation revealed a number of fallen or broken courtstones that were generally smaller and, apparently, less securely bedded. One of these, still exposed on the S side of the court, is 0.3m high. Within the court, c. 1.2m inside the entrance passage, was a low set stone that the excavators considered to be a ritual feature. The excavation also revealed a shallow pit within the court and two small occurrences of charcoal. Before the excavation only a single orthostat of the gallery, apart from the entrance jambs, was visible. This, the segmenting jamb on the N side of the gallery, is 0.75m high. On excavation the socket of its southern counterpart, the line of the N side of the front chamber and the socket of the backstone were uncovered. An overall gallery length of c. 5m and a width of c. 3m were thus indicated. The N side of the front chamber was delineated by a built edge of cairn stones that the excavators believed abutted the missing sidestone(s). This chamber was c. 2m long and was separated from the rear chamber by transversely set segmenting jambs. The position of the socket for the backstone indicated that the rear chamber would have been c. 2.3m long. No packing-stones were found in this socket, which was c. 1.5m long and 0.4m wide. There was no trace of bone at the site, but a considerable array of stone implements, principally of flint, and some pottery sherds were found. The finds are, in the main, illustrated in the excavation report and again in Herity (1982; 1987). The numbers allotted to the finds in the excavation report are noted in parentheses below. The finds are also listed by Keeling (1988). A number of finds were recovered from the base of the cairn, all to the S of the area of the rear chamber. Five were flint implements: a plano-convex knife, its tip worked to a point (E 50:53); the tip of a plano-convex knife (E 50:52); an end scraper of roughly oval shape (E 50:49); and two leaf-shaped arrowheads (E 50:40 and E 50:44). The last has since been identified as a plano-convex knife (Herity 1987, 199, no. 6). Also found in this area were part of the blade portion of an axe of polished mudstone (E 50:57) and a crystal of clear quartz (E 50:59). From a position 'fairly high' in the cairn and to the S of the front chamber the tip of a plano-convex flint knife (E 50:51) was recovered. A number of flints were found at or just outside the cairn perimeter. A small leaf-shaped arrowhead, with part of its butt missing (E 50:42), and a hollow scraper (E 50:48) came from the original ground surface on the N side of the cairn. Part of a large worked flake (E 50:55) was found close to the kerb also on the N side of the cairn, and a small polygonal flint core (E 50:56) came from under collapsed cairn material to the N of the revetment. A small leaf-shaped arrowhead (E 50:43), its tip missing, the central portion of a javelinhead (E 50:47) and an end scraper of oval outline (E 50:50) were all found amid collapsed cairn material at the S side of the monument. A worked flint (E 50:54) was found beside the southern edge of the kerb, and a leaf-shaped arrowhead (E 50:41) was found on the original ground surface beyond the collapsed cairn material at the S side of the monument. In the court area a leaf-shaped chert arrowhead (E 50:45), its tip missing, and a lozenge-shaped flint arrowhead (E 50:46), its tip also missing, were both found in the blue clay that formed the floor of the court and gallery. The chert arrowhead was found just in front of the northern entrance jamb, and the other lay in front of the second courtstone, beyond the same jamb. A slender rod of stone (E 50:58) was found in the NW corner of the court. The majority of the finds from the gallery area were confined to the front chamber. From all over this chamber, apparently at floor level, the sherds of a large decorated bowl (E 50:21-37) were recovered. One large sherd was found lying at the base of the northern entrance jamb. Similar sherds (E 50:38), possibly of a different decorated bowl, were found in the forward area of the chamber. Three flint implements came from the floor of the chamber: a leaf-shaped arrowhead (E 50: 1), broken at its bulbar end; an intact leaf-shaped arrowhead (E 50:2) from behind the southern entrance jamb; and an end scraper (E 50:4), which appeared to have been subjected to heat, from the centre of the chamber. From the southern edge of the chamber came a flint core (E 50:8). Three beads of schistose stone—a lozenge-shaped one (E 50:5) and two of sub-spheroid shape (E 50:6 and E 50:7)—were found on the floor just to the rear of the centre of the chamber. Herity (1982, 334) refers to the finding of a flint axehead in this chamber, but it is not mentioned in his later work on the finds from court tombs (Herity 1987, 198-9) or in the excavators' report. From the floor of the rear chamber came a leaf-shaped flint arrowhead (E 50:3). This was found near the socket of the southern segmenting jamb. In addition to the finds listed above, numerous pieces of worked flint, a piece of worked quartz and worked chert were recovered from the site. S