Burial, Castlesaffron, Co. Cork

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Burial, Castlesaffron, Co. Cork

Near the gate of Crobeg, in the north Cork townland of Castlesaffron, a stone coffin was pulled from the earth containing the skeleton of a remarkably large man, a sword laid beside him.

It is the kind of discovery that tends to generate more questions than answers, and in this case the record offers almost nothing else to work with.

The find was noted by Jones in 1901, who placed it at roughly a century before his writing, meaning the coffin was most likely uncovered sometime in the early 1800s. Stone-lined or stone-cut coffins of this kind, sometimes called cist burials or grave slabs depending on their construction, were used across Ireland from the early medieval period onward, and the presence of a sword alongside the body suggests a burial of some social standing, possibly from the early medieval or later medieval period. The "man of large proportions" is a detail that recurs in Irish folklore and antiquarian writing with a kind of regularity that historians treat cautiously, since it often reflects the tendency of earlier observers to read unusual height into old skeletal remains. Whether the sword survives in any collection is not recorded, and the precise location of the original find has not been further documented.

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