Cist, Kinard, Co. Mayo

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Burial Sites

Cist, Kinard, Co. Mayo

On the south-eastern side of a gravel ridge in Kinard townland, overlooking a bend in the Deel River with Nephin Mountain on the southern horizon, a small stone-built grave held an undisturbed secret for roughly four thousand years.

A cist, in the archaeological sense, is a box-like burial chamber made from flat slabs set on edge, sealed with capstones, and usually buried just below ground. This one is modest in scale, measuring just over a metre in length internally, less than a metre wide, and under sixty centimetres deep, yet what it contained when it was opened was unexpectedly complete.

The grave first came to light in 1930, when land reclamation work broke the surface about forty centimetres down. Rather than being properly recorded at that point, it was simply reburied. It was only when it was exposed again in 1934 that a full record was made. The construction is careful: four edge-set side slabs forming the long walls, a single upright closing each short end, two capstones laid with their smooth faces turned inward, and a floor roughly paved with small shale slabs. Inside lay the inhumed remains of a young adult, possibly female and aged somewhere between seventeen and twenty-five at death, most likely placed in a crouched position with the head toward the south end. The bones were poorly preserved, but two fragments of mussel shell and a small ceramic vessel had survived in the south-west corner. The vessel is a tripartite vase food vessel, a type of Bronze Age pottery associated with burial ritual, standing just under eight centimetres tall and decorated with incised zig-zag lines, horizontal bands, and rows of small impressed depressions. One perforated lug remains intact. Recovered in fragments, it is now held in the National Museum of Ireland under accession number 1935:16. Radiocarbon dating of a bone sample placed the burial between approximately 2024 and 1772 BC, firmly within the Early Bronze Age.

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