At the summit of the Hill of Allen in County Kildare, workers digging foundations for a tower made an unexpected discovery beneath the ground: a cist, one of the stone-lined box graves used in prehistoric Ireland to inter the dead. The find was almost incidental, a burial site encountered not by archaeologists but by labourers going about entirely different business, and it says something about the depth of history compacted into this particular hill that such a thing could surface so casually.

The Hill of Allen rises to around 676 feet above sea level and carries considerable mythological weight as the legendary seat of Fionn mac Cumhaill and the Fianna. Writing between 1903 and 1905, O'Grady recorded that the tower standing at the summit was built on top of a raised mound, and that during the digging of its foundations, a cist-vein came to light. A cist, in its simplest form, is a small burial chamber made from flat stone slabs, typically covering the remains of one individual from the Bronze Age or earlier. Finding one beneath a later structure is not unusual in Ireland, where the landscape has been layered with human activity across millennia, but the circumstance here, a probable prehistoric grave disturbed by nineteenth-century construction on a mound already steeped in legend, is a particular kind of collision between eras.