Flat cemetery, Aghfarrell, Co. Dublin

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Burial Grounds

Flat cemetery, Aghfarrell, Co. Dublin

Somewhere on the west-facing slope of Ballinacorney Hill in County Dublin, a Bronze Age man was buried in a carefully arranged stone box, drawn up on his right side with a ceramic vessel tucked in behind him.

No mound was raised above the grave. No visible marker was left. The burial was what archaeologists call a flat cemetery, a grouping of graves that sits flush with the ground surface, anonymous to anyone passing over it, and for thousands of years it went entirely unnoticed.

The site came to light not through excavation but through quarrying. In 1938, workers cutting into a sandpit at Aghfarrell disturbed the burials, and what emerged was recorded by Raftery in that same year. The principal find was a cist, a type of burial chamber built from stone slabs and set into the ground, in this case constructed entirely from granite. It was a short trapezoidal shape, roughly a metre in length, just over half a metre wide, and about half a metre deep. Inside lay the crouched remains of an adult male, positioned on his right side. Behind the body, in the corner of the cist, a bowl food vessel had been placed, the kind of decorated ceramic container associated with Early Bronze Age burial practice, thought to have held offerings or provisions for the dead. Two further pit burials were also uncovered in the same sandpit during the same quarrying episode, suggesting this was a small but deliberate burial ground rather than an isolated interment. The site is recorded in the work of both Raftery and John Waddell, whose studies of Irish Bronze Age burial remain key reference points for this period.

The practical difficulty with visiting Aghfarrell is that the site is not precisely located in the archaeological record. Its position on the slopes of Ballinacorney Hill is known in general terms, but the disturbance caused by quarrying means there is no intact feature to identify on the ground. The area itself sits in the Dublin uplands, and the hillside can be accessed on foot, though anyone hoping to find a marked or visible monument will be disappointed. What remains is largely a matter of record rather than landscape. The value of the place is perhaps best understood through the archive, through Waddell's 1990 survey and the national monuments database entry compiled by Geraldine Stout and Padraig Clancy, which preserves what the quarry face briefly revealed before the ground closed over it again.

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Aghfarrell, Co. Dublin
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