Cist, Coumaraglinmountain, Co. Waterford

Co. Waterford |

Burial Sites

Cist, Coumaraglinmountain, Co. Waterford

On a gentle west-facing slope above the upper Araglin river valley in County Waterford, a cairn of stones conceals a small stone-lined grave that has sat undisturbed for several thousand years. The grave is a cist, a type of box-like burial chamber assembled from upright slabs and sealed with a capstone, used across Ireland and Britain during the Bronze Age to inter the dead, sometimes with modest grave goods. This particular cist measures roughly 0.9 metres by 0.6 metres, with a depth of 0.8 metres, and is covered by a roofstone of 1.45 metres in length. A second cist sits nearby within the same cairn, suggesting the site served as a focus for burial over time rather than as a single, isolated act of interment.

The broader landscape here is dense with prehistoric remains. Approximately 60 metres to the north, on the far side of an east-west stream that divides the hillside, a separate burial cairn occupies the slope. Together these monuments form part of a recognised complex at Coumaraglinmountain, a concentration that points to this remote valley having held some ceremonial or funerary significance for the communities who lived and grazed livestock across these uplands in prehistory. The site is recorded in Michael Moore's 1995 survey of County Waterford's archaeological monuments, which brought together much of what is formally known about the area's Bronze Age remains.

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