Dr Noel McCarthy

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129 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Aug 2026 last heard 7 Aug

Dr Noel McCarthy’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Aug 2026 with 1.

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Talking History with Patrick Geoghegan · Neolithic Tombs In Galway · 7 Aug 2026 podcast

Now it was propped on another large stone.

So it did it couldn't have been, you know, a a a glacial boulder, for example.

But we did we definitely weren't expecting to find the pit beneath it that's over a meter deep.

and with the archaeological deposits right at the bottom.

So that was an absolutely stunning find.

I I don't know of one anywhere in the country that has such a feature beneath.

Obviously you will have finds and and and tombs where they will have a hollow beneath them from either be the point where the stone itself was raised up

And the hollow beneath was actually the the depression that it sat in because it was so heavy itself.

This, however, is a rock cut.

pit.

It's about four meters by four meters and like I said, just over a meter deep.

So there's a lot of work going into this and just towards the end of the dig

At the very, very bottom we found um an area of very, very high intensity charcoal.

And the the rock face beside it was cracked and heat shattered.

So I think what they were doing on top of using the natural gripes and fissures in the bedrock to excavate the pit, they've actually been extending the sides by fire setting against it.

and then breaking away the shattered limestone.

with probably moles, we found one large uh piece of granite, actually two large pieces of granite nearby, which most likely were used to break away that rock face and make the pit even bigger and straighten that side, for example.

So a really, really interesting series of excavations, not just from us, but from the people who excavated the pit way back in most likely the Neolithic period.

Yeah, it's it's a fantastic piece of of um of stone.

It's

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