Cist, Kelshamore, Co. Wicklow

Co. Wicklow |

Burial Sites

Cist, Kelshamore, Co. Wicklow

On a south-facing slope at Kelshamore in County Wicklow, the cremated remains of a Bronze Age adult lie buried in a stone-lined grave smaller than a kitchen table.

The grave is not visible from the surface. Houses have since been built nearby. The dead, in other words, have quietly become neighbours.

Two cist graves, a type of small rectangular burial box formed from upright stone slabs and a capstone, were uncovered in successive years, 1950 and 1951, lying roughly 5.4 metres apart on the same gentle slope. The first, measuring approximately 0.95 metres north to south and 0.58 metres east to west, had been disturbed by the time it was found, though fragments of a ceramic bowl survived. The second was more intact and more revealing: it measured 0.7 metres by 0.2 metres, just large enough to hold the cremated remains of an adult, a bowl food vessel, and a plano-convex flint knife. A bowl food vessel is a ceramic pot of a type commonly placed with the dead during the Early Bronze Age, probably holding food or drink for use in an afterlife. A plano-convex flint knife, flat on one face and curved on the other, was a finely worked tool that also appears in funerary contexts across Ireland and Britain during this period. Together, the objects suggest a burial rite practised across these islands roughly four thousand years ago, in which the dead were cremated and interred with objects of practical and perhaps symbolic significance. The finds were documented by P. J. Hartnett, whose 1952 report remains the primary record, with later reference in John Waddell's survey of Irish Bronze Age burials.

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