Cist, Ballyshurdane, Co. Cork
Co. Cork |
Burial Sites
Beneath a field in Ballyshurdane, County Cork, lie the disturbed remains of a Bronze Age cist burial, a type of grave formed from flat stone slabs set as floor, walls, and lid to create a small stone box around the dead.
Nothing marks the spot today, and the objects that once gave it meaning are gone, their whereabouts unknown. What survives is largely a paper trail, and even that is incomplete.
The cist came to light sometime between 1900 and 1905 when a farmer ploughing the pasture broke into it. Inside were three cinerary urns, vessels used in Bronze Age Ireland to hold the cremated remains of the dead, arranged within the stone-lined grave. Two of the urns were already in fragments by the time they were recovered. The third was intact and still contained ashes. That unbroken urn was subsequently taken to America, and its current location, like that of the other two, is unknown. The vessel was later described by the archaeologist Rosaleen Kavanagh from a photograph: it carried three widely spaced horizontal cordons, with incised decoration in oblique lines that occasionally intersected, running from rim to base, and a apparently flat rim. It is a precise enough description to place the urn within the decorative traditions of Irish Bronze Age pottery, but the object itself has slipped entirely from the archaeological record. The site lies roughly 100 metres south-east of a standing stone, and scholars have noted some uncertainty about whether this burial and a reported cist at nearby Aghacross refer to the same discovery recorded twice, or two separate finds. That question remains open.