Cist, Cabragh, Co. Monaghan

Co. Monaghan |

Burial Sites

Cist, Cabragh, Co. Monaghan

On a low, broad spur of land in County Monaghan, aligned roughly south-west to north-east, someone was buried in a stone box not much longer than a child's bed.

The grave was a cist, a type of prehistoric burial chamber made by setting flat slabs of stone on edge to form a tight rectangular enclosure, then capping it with a covering stone. This particular example measured approximately 1.2 metres by 0.6 metres, which is about as compact as these burials come.

The cist at Cabragh came to light in 1948, and inside it was a bowl food vessel, a category of decorated ceramic pot associated with Early Bronze Age burial practice in Ireland and Britain, typically dating to somewhere in the second millennium BC. The vessels are called food vessels partly because of an older assumption that they held provisions for the dead, though the precise ritual significance remains debated. The Cabragh example is now held in the National Museum of Ireland, having been recorded by A. T. Lucas in 1960 and referenced in John Waddell's broader survey of Irish Bronze Age burials in 1970. The spur itself, unremarkable in profile, is the kind of landscape feature that Bronze Age communities sometimes favoured for burial, elevated just enough above the surrounding ground to mark a presence without commanding dramatic height.

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