Cist, Kiltalown, Co. Dublin
Co. Dublin |
Burial Sites
Somewhere beneath the ground of south County Dublin, or possibly no longer beneath it at all, lies the record of a burial so briefly documented that its precise location has been lost to time.
The Kiltalown area contains, or once contained, a cist, a type of small stone-lined grave characteristic of the Bronze Age, in which a body or cremated remains were placed within a box-like structure of upright slabs and a capstone. What sets this particular site apart is not what survives but what does not: the burial was noted and then, effectively, misplaced by history.
The sole record of this cist comes from a reference made by Price in 1940, citing a discovery made somewhere in the nineteenth century. That is the full extent of what is formally known. No excavation report, no precise coordinates, no account of what the grave contained. It is the kind of entry that appears in archaeological surveys as a placeholder for something that mattered enough to mention but not enough, at the time, to document thoroughly. Geraldine Stout and Padraig Clancy, who compiled the notes on this site, could add nothing further to Price's sparse record when they revisited it for upload in July 2018.
For anyone drawn to the Kiltalown area with this burial in mind, the honest expectation is that there is nothing to find, or at least nothing identifiable. The site is not precisely located, which means any ground in the broader area could, in theory, hold the remains of the original find or indeed others yet unrecorded. Kiltalown Park, the green space that now occupies part of the area, is publicly accessible, and the landscape itself offers some sense of the kind of low-lying Dublin terrain where prehistoric communities once farmed and buried their dead. The value here is less in finding a specific spot and more in understanding how thinly the archaeological record sometimes survives, a single line in a 1940 publication standing in for whatever ceremony once took place.