Cist, Frankfort, Co. Limerick
Co. Limerick |
Burial Sites
A small pottery cup, barely six centimetres tall, is now the only surviving trace of a Bronze Age burial that was quietly destroyed by quarrymen in County Limerick in 1939.
The grave itself, a cist, was a modest stone box of the kind commonly used for individual burials during the Bronze Age, typically formed from a handful of flat slabs set on edge to create a rough chamber and then covered with a capstone. At Frankfort, the cist measured roughly three feet by two feet and was made of four or perhaps five flagstones. When the quarry workers broke it apart during operations in a gravel pit, they found only a single small vessel inside, now gone from the landscape entirely.
The cup belongs to a type archaeologists call a Pygmy Cup, a category of miniature pottery vessel whose exact ritual function remains debated but which turns up with some regularity in Bronze Age cist burials across Ireland and Britain, often accompanying cremated remains or other grave goods. The Frankfort example is a biconical form, meaning its profile widens to a central ridge before tapering again, and it was well fired with a bevelled internal rim and decoration of deep grooves around the body. It stands 5.9 centimetres high with a rim diameter of 5.5 centimetres. After the quarry find, it was eventually donated to University College Galway. The discovery was recorded and discussed by Rynne in 1973 to 1974 and by Kavanagh in 1977, which gives the site whatever documentation it has, since the physical evidence was largely obliterated at the moment of discovery.
What remains at Frankfort today is considerably harder to interpret than a cup in a museum case. The area where the cist once sat is now level, boggy ground, and there is a sub-rectangular setting of small irregular sandstone boulders on the site, measuring approximately 1.6 metres north to south and 4 metres east to west. The individual stones are modest in size, averaging around 0.3 metres square, though one larger flat slab measuring 0.75 metres by 0.3 metres lies on the eastern side of the setting. A field drain runs immediately along the southern edge. Whether this stone arrangement is related to the original burial or represents something else entirely is not established, and visitors should expect a quiet, somewhat ambiguous patch of terrain rather than anything obviously monumental. The cup itself, if you want to see the tangible remnant of this burial, is the thing to trace.