Cist, Kelshamore, Co. Wicklow

Co. Wicklow |

Burial Sites

Cist, Kelshamore, Co. Wicklow

On a south-facing slope at Kelshamore in County Wicklow, two Bronze Age graves lie beneath ground that has since been partly built over, their exact positions now uncertain.

The graves are cists, a type of small stone-lined box burial common in Ireland and Britain during the Early Bronze Age, typically just large enough to contain a crouched body or a cremation deposit along with a few grave goods. What makes this particular pair quietly compelling is not their scale but their ordinariness, the sense of two separate acts of burial, carried out within a year of each other, on an unremarkable hillside that has since been absorbed into the fabric of a modern neighbourhood.

The two cists were discovered in 1950 and 1951, set roughly 5.4 metres apart. The first, measuring approximately 0.95 metres north to south and 0.58 metres east to west, had been disturbed by the time it was examined, though fragments of a ceramic bowl survived. The second was smaller, just 0.7 metres by 0.2 metres, and yielded rather more: the cremated remains of an adult, a bowl food vessel of the kind frequently placed with the dead during this period as a symbolic provision, and a plano-convex flint knife, a tool shaped by careful flaking to produce a flat underside and a curved upper edge. The finds were recorded by Hartnett in 1952 and later cited by Waddell in 1990, placing the site within a broader map of Bronze Age burial practice across Ireland. Neither grave is visible at ground level today, and subsequent house building in the immediate vicinity has made the precise location difficult to pin down.

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