Burial mound, Aghnaskeagh, Co. Cavan

Co. Cavan |

Burial Sites

Burial mound, Aghnaskeagh, Co. Cavan

A low rise in a field near Mount Nugent, barely two metres above the surrounding ground and roughly thirty metres across at its widest, gave little outward sign of what lay beneath it.

It was only in October 1992, when a bulldozer was cutting through the land during reclamation work, that human bones began to surface, first from the centre of the mound, then the following day from its perimeter. What had appeared to be an unremarkable swell in the Cavan farmland turned out to conceal a cemetery whose age and origins remain, even now, unknown.

An investigation led by Eamon Kelly recovered remains from two machine cuttings across the mound. The burials had been placed in simple dug graves with no stone lining, and all were apparently oriented west to east, with heads to the west, a convention associated with Christian burial practice across medieval Ireland and Britain. At least eleven individuals were identified across both cuttings: adults, adolescents, a child aged between five and seven, and an infant probably less than a year old at death. One adolescent showed signs of porotic hyperostosis, a pitting of the skull bone typically linked to iron-deficiency anaemia. The spread of ages, as researchers noted, looks like a cross-section of an ordinary community graveyard rather than anything more selective or ceremonial. No associated objects were found, which left the question of dating entirely open. Somewhere nearby, set against the field boundary to the south-west of the mound, is a large boulder carved with a crude Latin cross, a detail recorded separately and one that hints, without confirming, at a Christian context for the site.

The mound itself survives, though the two machine cuttings made in 1992 caused considerable disturbance to its upper layers. It sits in agricultural land, and the cross-marked boulder beside the field boundary remains in place, a quiet and easy-to-miss feature that rewards those who know to look for it.

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