Cist, Cush, Co. Limerick

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Burial Sites

Cist, Cush, Co. Limerick

Sometime in prehistory, a person's cremated remains were gathered, placed inside a ceramic urn, and the mouth of that urn was sealed with a cloth or some other perishable covering before being carefully inverted over the bones.

The vessel was then lowered, upside down, into a carefully constructed stone box cut into red sandstone at Cush in County Limerick. It is a small, precise act of burial, and the logic of it, once you work it out, is quietly striking: whoever placed that urn in the grave had to keep the covering in place just long enough to set it down without losing a single fragment of the cremated remains inside.

The burial at Cush, recorded as Burial No. II in the excavation notes, is one of four urn and cist burials uncovered in the western half of a bivallate ringfort, that is, a roughly circular enclosed settlement defined by two concentric earthen banks. The excavation was carried out between 1934 and 1935 by Seán P. Ó Ríordáin, whose published account from 1940 gives a precise picture of what was found. A cist grave is a box-like burial chamber lined and covered with flat stone slabs, and this example was built with some care. The red sandstone bedrock had been cut away to accommodate it, and a base of one larger slab and five smaller stones was laid down first to create a level surface for the side-slabs. Three sides of the cist used single slabs; the fourth was assembled from one larger stone and two smaller ones. A capstone, nearly a metre at its widest point and about twelve centimetres thick, sealed the whole structure from above. The burial lay approximately 2.13 metres south-west of the first burial found at the site.

The site at Cush is an archaeological monument rather than a visitor attraction with managed access, so anyone curious enough to seek it out should consult the National Monuments Service records beforehand and be aware that the landscape around Cush has layers of overlapping prehistoric activity. The cist itself was excavated and recorded rather than left in situ for open viewing, so what draws people here tends to be the broader ringfort earthworks and the sense of a place that has been continuously significant across very different periods. Ó Ríordáin's original plans and photographs survive and remain the most detailed record of what the burial chamber looked like at the moment of its uncovering.

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