Cist, Glennahulla, Co. Cork

Co. Cork |

Burial Sites

Cist, Glennahulla, Co. Cork

Beneath a field in Glennahulla, County Cork, lies what was once a Bronze Age cist grave, a small stone-lined burial box of a type used across Ireland for individual interments during the second millennium BC.

Today there is nothing to see. The land has been under tillage, the surface shows no trace, and the burial itself survives only as a footnote in the archaeological record, remembered largely because of what happened when it was disturbed.

In 1876, an urn was found in what appears to have been one of these cist graves. The vessel, almost certainly a ceramic funerary urn of the kind used to contain cremated remains, fell to pieces the moment it was removed from the grave. It is a familiar story in Irish archaeology, where objects that have survived undisturbed for three or four thousand years can crumble almost instantly on exposure to air and handling. Whether the urn had already been weakened by pressure from the surrounding soil, or simply could not bear the shock of removal after so long in the ground, nothing of it was preserved. The grave goods, if there were any beyond the urn itself, go unrecorded. The scholar John Waddell noted the find in 1990, drawing on earlier work, but there is little more to be said about what was lost.

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