Cist, Moydow Glebe, Co. Longford

Co. Longford |

Burial Sites

Cist, Moydow Glebe, Co. Longford

Beneath a flat stretch of pasture at Moydow Glebe in County Longford, two people were buried in a manner that briefly convinced a reporter they had left a message for the future.

When a double cist was uncovered around 1930, the flat capstone covering the graves, measuring roughly 1.52 metres by 1.31 metres, appeared to carry figure carvings and inscriptions that an Irish Times correspondent in August 1935 described as believed to be ogham, the early medieval script in which letters are represented by a series of notches and strokes cut along a central line. It was the kind of detail that transforms a field find into something arresting.

A cist is a small stone-lined pit used as a burial chamber, typically associated with the Bronze Age in Ireland, and a double cist of this kind would have held two such compartments side by side. Each contained a crouched skeleton, the body drawn up in a foetal position as was customary in prehistoric inhumation burial. The supposed inscriptions, however, did not survive scrutiny for long. A report from the same year, held in the National Museum of Ireland files, concluded that the markings were almost certainly the result of plough damage rather than any deliberate inscription. John Waddell, recording the site in 1990, noted the find without resolving the ambiguity, leaving the capstone's surface as an open question, or perhaps simply a closed one.

The site is not visible at ground level today, absorbed back into the level pasture where it was found. Nothing marks the spot.

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