It is an easy thing to pass without a second glance, and yet beneath what looks like a modest pile of field clearance once lay one of the more intimate objects the Bronze Age left behind in Ireland.

In 1933, a cist was uncovered here, a type of small stone-lined burial box typically constructed from upright slabs with a flat capstone laid across the top. This particular example was strikingly small, measuring roughly 0.43 metres by 0.3 metres, just large enough to contain a food vessel, the ceramic pot placed with the dead that gives the period one of its defining artefact types. Food vessels are generally associated with early Bronze Age burial practice, and their presence in cist graves across Ireland and Britain suggests a belief that the dead required provisions, or perhaps objects of symbolic value, for whatever followed. The cist at Knockanree was set within a rectangular enclosure that appears on the 1838 Ordnance Survey six-inch map, meaning the feature was visible and recorded by nineteenth-century surveyors long before anyone understood what lay inside it. The cairn that survives today, with its traces of stone facing along the edges, may represent the remains of that same enclosure rather than the burial structure itself.