Thursday, September 19, 2013

Gortnavern Portal Tomb







Gortnavern is a stunner of a tomb and although the capstone has slipped back it is being kept in place by one of the side stone's that has fallen in.
The long thin capstone is over 3 and a half meters long and the two portal stones are 2 meters in height.
This tomb gives you many different shapes when viewed from all sides, and all of them are very striking.

Gortnavern's real problem (apart from access) is the gorse growing all around the tomb, to give you an idea how bad this is - if you look at the small image I was stood in the open patch just below the tomb " but I could not see any part of the tomb ".

Access"
This is where your going to have some fun !

This tomb can be tackled in a couple of ways, and both of them are far from easy !!
The way I found this tomb I could only recommend if you are willing to battle it out.

I saw no sign's for this tomb so I got lucky when the tomb was spotted from the car driving up the road.
I came at the site from the East which involved crossing a strong stream and then battling my way through some gorse to finally arrive at the tomb.
Leaving the site I could not find the part of the stream that I crossed at, so I walked alongside the stream back down towards a farmhouse where I met the farmer who very kindly drove me back up to my car.