Cist, Derroograne, Co. Cork

Co. Cork |

Burial Sites

Cist, Derroograne, Co. Cork

On a low knoll in rough hill pasture above Derroograne, a small stone box sits open to the sky, partially choked with bog debris and largely ignored by the landscape around it.

It is a cist, the prehistoric burial form in which a grave was constructed from upright slabs to create a tight rectangular chamber, typically just large enough to receive a crouched body or a deposit of cremated bone. This one measures roughly 1.1 metres along its longer axis and just under a metre across, with its sides lined by individual slabs on two faces and paired slabs on the other two. Nearby, a larger slab lying flat to the north-west may once have served as its cover-stone, and a smaller one to the south-east may have played a similar role, though both have since shifted from whatever position they originally held.

The cist sits within a network of old field boundaries and commands a clear westward view towards Glengarriff Harbour, a detail that feels almost too deliberate, as if whoever chose the spot had an eye for the same horizon we would notice today. A small mound of stones mixed with bog debris to the south-west may represent material that was removed from the interior at some point, suggesting the grave was disturbed, though by whom and when is unknown. What lends the site an additional layer of interest is its proximity to two hut sites lying roughly 40 metres to the south-west. Whether the people who used those shelters were contemporary with the burial or came long after it, the grouping hints at a patch of ground that was returned to, lived beside, and in some sense organised around, over a considerable stretch of time.

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Pete F
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