Cist, Stillorgan Park, Co. Dublin

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Burial Sites

Cist, Stillorgan Park, Co. Dublin

Beside an obelisk on the grounds of a religious institution in suburban south County Dublin, a young woman had been lying undisturbed for thousands of years before a gardening clearance in 1954 brought her quietly back into the light.

The find came not from a dedicated excavation but from the mundane business of shifting stones from a rockery, which is precisely the kind of accidental circumstance that makes it so easy to imagine how many similar discoveries remain beneath ordinary ground.

What the clearance revealed was a short cist, a type of small stone-lined grave box used in Bronze Age Ireland to contain a crouched or laid-out body within a tight, carefully constructed chamber. This particular example was rectangular in plan, measuring just under a metre in length, 0.46 metres wide, and 0.47 metres high, with its long axis oriented north to south. Inside was the inhumation burial, meaning the body had been placed whole rather than cremated, of a young adult female. Alongside her was a single flint flake, a modest but deliberate inclusion. The site sits at the junction of Craysfort Avenue and Craysford Woods, within the grounds of St Augustine's in Stillorgan, and the discovery is documented by Cahill and Sikora in their 2011 survey.

The grounds are not a public archaeological site, and the cist itself is no longer visible in any meaningful way following its discovery during the rockery clearance. The location is noted at the junction of the two roads, close to the obelisk that still stands on the property. For those with an interest in the Bronze Age dead of the greater Dublin area, the value here is less in what can be seen and more in the knowledge that the suburban landscape of Stillorgan carries far older occupants than its mid-twentieth-century development might suggest.

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