Corraghy head
The Corraghy head is the name given to an Irish stone idol sculpture uncovered c. 1855 in the townland of Drumeague, County Cavan. Although now broken apart and mostly lost, it originally consisted of a human head on one side and a ram's on the other, of which the human head survives, and is now in the National Museum of Ireland, but is rarely displayed.
The same excavation unearthed the contemporary two-headed Corleck stone idol.
The structure is usually dated to the Iron Age; based on its iconography probably to the 1st or 2nd century AD.
Description[edit]
The human head is unusually naturalistic for the time, having hair
Discovery[edit]
It was uncovered by a local farmer c. 1855 in the townland of Drumeague, County Cavan, during the excavation of a large passage tomb dated to c. 2500 BC. The structurefound buried alongside the Corleck Head, another but less complex janiform sculpture.[2][3] However its age and significance were not understood until the 1940s, when they were seen by the local historian Thomas J. Barron, who recognised them as pre-historic.[4]
Function[edit]
Today archaeologists assume both the Corleck and Corraghy were intended to be placed on top of a large shrine, and were buried around the same time, perhaps to hide them from early Christians keen to eradicate the worship of pagan idols, or any history of Celtic "head-cults".[5]
References[edit]
Sources[edit]
- Barron, Thomas J. "Some Beehive Quernstones from Counties Cavan and Monaghan". Clogher Record, volume 9, No. 1, 1976. JSTOR 27695733
- Ó Hogain, Dáithí. "Patronage & Devotion in Ancient Irish Religion". History Ireland, volume 8, no. 4, winter 2000. JSTOR 27724824
- Ross, Anne. The Pagan Celts. Denbighshire: John Jones, 1998. ISBN 978-1-8710-8361-3
- Ross, Anne. Druids: Preachers of Immortality. Cheltenham: The History Press, 2010. ISBN 978-0-7524-1433-1
- Waddell, John. The Prehistoric Archaeology of Ireland. Galway: Galway University Press, 1998. ISBN 978-1-8698-5739-4
External links[edit]
- The Corleck Head and other aspects of east Cavan's ancient past. Video lecture by Jonathan Smyth, Cavan Library, 2023