Cist, Tuckmill, Co. Wicklow
Co. Wicklow |
Burial Sites
On a gentle north-west-facing slope in County Wicklow, a farmer clearing land in the mid-1920s uncovered something considerably older than his fields.
Beneath a low circular mound, he found a cist, a type of prehistoric stone-lined grave, roughly 1.82 metres in length, paved with flat stones and sealed with a capstone. Inside were human bones and a curious substance described at the time as a light yellowish-coloured paste, the nature of which was not fully explained. The find was recorded, but the mound itself did not survive intact. Some of the stones lining the grave were removed by the farmer and incorporated into nearby field walls, which is how prehistoric monuments so often disappear quietly into the working landscape.
The site was documented by Liam Price, whose 1934 account remains the principal record of what was found here. Cists of this kind are generally associated with the Bronze Age, when individual or small-group burials in stone boxes set within or beneath earthen mounds were common across Ireland and Britain. The yellowish paste is intriguing but not unique to this site; similar substances have been noted in other prehistoric burials, though their exact composition and purpose remain matters of interpretation. What the Tuckmill cist represents, in its quiet way, is the widespread prehistoric use of the Wicklow landscape for funerary ritual, long before the historical record begins.