Cist, Balline, Co. Limerick

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Burial Sites

Cist, Balline, Co. Limerick

A field in County Limerick holds burials that have slipped almost entirely from the record.

Just north of the old boundary wall of Emlygrennan graveyard, in what is now ordinary pasture, cartographers once marked the words "Stone Graves" on a later edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map. That annotation is very nearly all that remains to suggest that something significant lies underfoot.

The site sits immediately north of Emlygrennan Church, a structure that itself once occupied the centre of a rectangular graveyard. The church and graveyard complex are recorded separately in the Sites and Monuments Record, and the relationship between the two features hints at a layered past. A cist burial, to explain the term briefly, is a type of grave in which the body is placed within a box-like structure formed from flat stone slabs, a practice associated most commonly with the Bronze Age in Ireland, though the tradition persisted and varied across long periods. The annotation "Stone Graves" on the Cassini edition of the six-inch map may refer to two such stone-lined burials sitting just outside the graveyard's northern wall. What makes the record particularly thin is what is absent from it: the site does not appear on the 1840 Ordnance Survey six-inch map, nor on the more detailed 1897 twenty-five-inch edition. By the time satellite imagery was examined between 2011 and 2013, no surface remains were visible at all.

There is, practically speaking, nothing to see at ground level today. The burials, if they survive, lie beneath the grass of a working pasture field, and the annotation on the Cassini map remains the only cartographic acknowledgement that anything is there. Emlygrennan Church itself is worth locating as a reference point, and the graveyard boundary wall to its north marks roughly where the cist burials are thought to have been. Anyone with an interest in early burial practice in the Irish landscape will find the site thought-provoking precisely because of its near-total invisibility, a place documented by a mapmaker's two-word note and very little else.

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