Cist, Mill Land, Co. Westmeath

Co. Westmeath |

Burial Sites

Cist, Mill Land, Co. Westmeath

Beneath the pasture of Mill Land, Co. Westmeath, a Bronze Age grave was interred so completely that neither the Ordnance Survey mapmakers of 1837 nor their successors revising the maps in 1913 ever recorded it, and aerial photography has since confirmed there is nothing visible at the surface at all.

What survives is essentially a stone box, a cist burial, measuring just half a metre by thirty centimetres, its sides formed from overlapping slabs arranged to create a small rectangular chamber in the earth.

A cist of this kind is one of the more intimate forms of prehistoric burial, a tightly fitted stone container placed in the ground to hold the remains of the dead. This particular example sits on a gravel ridge in gently undulating pasture, with the Riverstown River running roughly 120 metres to the south-west. Inside the chamber, excavators found the cremated bones of an adult alongside a bowl food vessel, a ceramic pot of a type commonly placed with the dead during the Bronze Age, probably intended to accompany the deceased into the afterlife. The find was catalogued by the National Museum of Ireland in 1963. Scholarship places it firmly in the Bronze Age; Etienne Rynne described it as such in 1964, and John Waddell included it in his 1970 study, recording its precise dimensions and orientation along a NNE-SSW axis.

The site carries a particular kind of quietness about it in the historical record. Unplotted for nearly two centuries of systematic mapping, invisible from the air, and detectable now only through the objects removed from it, this small grave in the Westmeath countryside exists almost entirely in the archive rather than in the landscape.

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