Cist, Loughgur, Co. Limerick

Co. Limerick |

Burial Sites

Cist, Loughgur, Co. Limerick

On the northern face of Knockadoon Hill, at roughly 300 feet above sea level on a bare limestone crag overlooking Lough Gur, a carefully constructed stone box once held the remains of an infant.

The grave is a cist, a type of small burial chamber built from flat stone slabs and used in prehistoric Ireland to inter the dead, often individually and with some deliberateness of arrangement. This one is modest in scale but precise in its making: rectangular in plan, formed from very regular limestone slabs, with a paved floor and the infant's skull oriented to the east.

The cist was uncovered in 1987 during an archaeological excavation led by Rose Cleary on Knockadoon Hill, funded by a grant from the Royal Irish Academy. The dig ran for ten weeks between late May and the end of July, and in that time three cist graves were excavated, all confined to the northern end of the site. The grave recorded as Feature 34 was one of these. A second cist was found at the same location, and a cave lies approximately 30 metres to the northwest, making this corner of the hill an unusually concentrated pocket of early activity. The site had not previously appeared on Ordnance Survey historic maps, which gives some sense of how quietly it had passed out of common knowledge before Cleary's work brought it back into record.

Knockadoon is a peninsula that juts into Lough Gur, one of the most archaeologically layered landscapes in Ireland, and the hill itself is accessible on foot from the Lough Gur visitor area. The northern side where the cist was found is now heavily wooded, and aerial imagery taken as recently as 2018 shows the excavation area obscured by tree cover, so there is little to see at ground level without prior knowledge of where to look. The lake and the broader hillside reward a walk regardless, but anyone with a specific interest in the cist should be aware that it sits within a working landscape of roots and rock, with no marker to single it out.

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