Gallery grave

Archeologist T. Douglas Price argues that the gallery grave was a form of community burial site.

Those placed in a gallery grave were most likely members of the same family or hamlet, and probably were intended to reinforce the sense of community.

[4] The walls of gallery graves were built of orthostats, slab-like stones set upright in the earth.

[11] Wedge-shaped gallery graves usually faced west, and often had a pair of upright stone slabs linking the inner and outer walls at the entrance.

Many gallery graves today lie exposed to the air, when originally they would have lain deep within a tumulus.

[1] Transepted gallery graves have burial monuments with side rooms extending laterally from a central chamber.

They are found at sites in the Loire valley of France, south west Great Britain and in Ireland and it is thought the builders had cultural links with one another.

They are so named because the burial chamber narrows at one end (usually decreasing both in height and width from west to east), producing a wedge shape in elevation.

An antechamber is separated from the burial area by a simple jamb or sill, and the doorway generally faces west.

[13] Archeologists Ian Shaw and Robert Jameson argued in 1999 that the best-researched gallery graves are the Severn-Cotswold tombs in Wales and South West England in the United Kingdom.