Cist, Fakeeragh, Co. Galway

Co. Galway |

Burial Sites

Cist, Fakeeragh, Co. Galway

On a ridge above Loch an Ime in west Galway, a stone-lined grave sits open to the sky, its capstone long gone and its eastern end exposed to the elements.

What remains is a rectangular cist, the kind of prehistoric burial chamber formed by setting thin upright slabs on edge to create a box-like cavity, just large enough to receive a crouched or contracted human body. The chamber measures roughly 1.65 metres in length and 0.7 metres wide, oriented along an east-west axis, a common alignment in prehistoric funerary practice though its precise significance remains debated. Without its capstone and eastern endstone, the interior is fully visible, which gives the site an unusual candour: you can see exactly how it was built, and how much has been lost.

Survey work recorded by Gibbons in 1988 noted that traces of a low, irregular cairn, a mound of stones heaped over or around the burial, survive around the cist, measuring approximately four metres by three and a half metres. The cairn abuts a natural rock outcrop immediately to the north, which may have been deliberately incorporated into the structure or simply made use of as a convenient boundary. Cist burials of this type are generally associated with the Bronze Age in Ireland, a period spanning roughly 2500 to 500 BC, during which individual inhumation or cremation within a stone-lined pit beneath a cairn was a widespread funerary tradition. The modest scale of this particular cairn, and the informality of its outline, suggests a relatively simple burial rather than an elaborate monument for a high-status individual.

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