Cist, Derryinver, Co. Galway

Co. Galway |

Burial Sites

Cist, Derryinver, Co. Galway

Beneath a low grassy hillock to the south of Tully Lough in Connemara, there is a prehistoric burial structure so small that it could almost be missed entirely.

Known locally as "a burial ground", the site contains a single cist, the term for a small stone-lined grave box of the type used throughout Bronze Age Ireland to inter human remains, sometimes cremated, sometimes not. This particular example measures just sixty centimetres long, forty centimetres wide, and twenty-five centimetres high, roofed by a capstone buried roughly ten centimetres below the present ground surface. That the local name preserves a memory of burial at all is quietly remarkable, given how little of the structure survives above ground and how thoroughly the landscape has moved on around it.

The cist rests on three sidestones, with two smaller stones blocking what would have been the fourth, open side. That arrangement, a three-sided box sealed on the remaining face with infill stones, is consistent with cist construction elsewhere in the west of Ireland, where single graves of this kind were sometimes inserted into existing mounds or placed beneath low earthen rises. The site was documented by Gibbons and Higgins in 1988 and later included in the published Archaeological Inventory of County Galway, compiled by Paul Gosling. Its poor state of preservation makes interpretation difficult, though the form is clear enough: this was a deliberate, contained burial, modest in scale but intentional in every stone placement.

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