Cist, Forenaghts Great, Co. Kildare

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Burial Sites

Cist, Forenaghts Great, Co. Kildare

Buried just to the north-west of a standing stone in County Kildare, within the raised earthwork of an ancient enclosure, is a stone-lined grave that held two people for perhaps four thousand years before anyone thought to open it. A cist, in the archaeological sense, is a box-shaped burial chamber made from flat slabs of stone; this one at Forenaghts Great is unusually large, running roughly two and a half metres in length and nearly a metre deep, with a carefully cobbled floor but no surviving roof.

When Macalister, Praeger, and Armstrong excavated the site in 1912, they found the cremated remains of an adult woman and an adult man interred together. Alongside the bones were three sherds of coarse pottery, a flint blade, a bone bead, and what is recorded as a wrist bracer. A wrist bracer is a small, polished stone plate, typically with perforations at each end, associated with archery and found widely across Bronze Age Europe; its presence here hints at a date somewhere in the earlier Bronze Age, when such objects carried considerable personal significance. The group of objects is modest by the standards of high-status prehistoric burial, but the scale of the cist itself, set deliberately beside a standing stone at the centre of an earthen enclosure, suggests the site was laid out with some care and intention. The standing stone and the enclosure remain, framing the spot where the grave was found much as they presumably did when it was first dug.

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