Cist, Roughaun, Co. Clare

Co. Clare |

Burial Sites

Cist, Roughaun, Co. Clare

On a south-facing slope of reclaimed grassland in County Clare, the 1916 Ordnance Survey six-inch map marks a spot with the plain, unambiguous label 'Ancient Grave'.

That kind of cartographic directness tends to signal something genuinely old, and in this case it refers to the partial remains of a prehistoric cist, a type of box-shaped stone burial chamber, typically built from upright slabs with a capstone laid across the top to enclose the dead.

The site entered the written record through the antiquarian Thomas Johnson Westropp, who noted it in 1900 in connection with a nearby monument at Cahermore, roughly 150 metres to the north-west. Westropp recorded that two skeletons had been found here, positioned in what he described as 'not extended, but with their feet to the east', suggesting a crouched or contracted burial, a posture commonly associated with prehistoric interment in Ireland. By 1907 he had gathered more detail, giving the cist dimensions of 1.67 metres in length and 1.1 metres in width, and attributing the discovery to a Mr G. Fitzgerald, who came across the burials in 1885. What survives today appears to be a single outcropping rock at the southern edge of a nearby cairn, a low mound of stones, measuring about a metre in length and 0.15 metres thick. It may represent all that remains of the original cist structure, the rest having been lost to the land clearance and reclamation that reshaped the surrounding field over the intervening centuries.

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