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King Orry's Grave, Minorca, Laxey

Place

King Orry's Grave is the largest megalithic tomb on the Isle of Man, a Neolithic chambered cairn dating to roughly 4,000-5,000 years ago, sited in the Minorca area on the northern edge of Laxey. Despite the name, it has no genuine connection to the Norse King Orry (Godred Crovan); the attribution is folklore layered onto a monument many centuries older than the Norse period. The site survives in two separate sections either side of a road, the result of nineteenth-century road and house building cutting through what was originally one monument: an eastern section with a semicircular, U-shaped forecourt and three burial chambers under a trapezoidal cairn, and a smaller western, cist-like section with a standing stone, excavated in 1930. It is managed by Manx National Heritage, with public access to both sections, one of which lies partly within a private garden.

Sources

  • Web research (already extensively covered on the live site under existing items 9627, 10425-10428, 10440, 10483, 11649 - this record is for the mapping dataset specifically, and should be linked to those rather than created as a wholly new item)
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