Cist, Poulnabrucky, Co. Clare
Co. Clare |
Burial Sites
In the townland of Poulnabrucky in County Clare, there is a cist, a type of small stone-lined burial box used in prehistoric Ireland, typically dating to the Bronze Age.
These simple graves, built from carefully arranged slabs to form a tight enclosure for a crouched body or cremated remains, are found scattered across the Irish landscape in their thousands, yet each one represents a deliberate act of burial, a community pausing to mark the death of one of its own. The name Poulnabrucky itself is worth a moment's attention; it derives from the Irish, most likely containing the element "poll", meaning a hole or pit, which sometimes points to a landscape feature that drew attention long before any formal record was made.
Beyond its classification as a cist and its location in Clare, the details of this particular monument remain largely undocumented in publicly available sources. What can be said is that cist burials in the Munster region frequently turn up during agricultural work or turf-cutting, often discovered accidentally after millennia of quiet concealment beneath field surfaces or low earthworks. Clare's geology, with its limestone pavements and thin soils, has a tendency to both preserve and obscure such features simultaneously, the stone environment protecting buried slabs while the flat, open terrain makes them easy to miss.
