Cist, Cappaphaudeen, Co. Cork

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Burial Sites

Cist, Cappaphaudeen, Co. Cork

A hawthorn tree grows from the centre of this small burial monument in north Cork, its roots threading down through the same cairn material that once covered a prehistoric grave.

That detail alone gives the site an odd, layered quality: ancient stonework, slow vegetative colonisation, and the hawthorn's long association in Irish folklore with boundaries between worlds, all occupying the same few square metres of ground.

The monument consists of a cist, a box-like burial chamber formed from four upright stone slabs, set into the western end of an oval cairn measuring roughly 4.2 metres east to west and 2.4 metres north to south, standing to a height of around 0.67 metres. A cist of this type is essentially a stone-lined pit or box, typically Bronze Age in origin, built to contain a single burial, sometimes with cremated remains and occasionally grave goods. The four slabs here vary considerably in size, the largest running to 1.4 metres in length, and the fourth is partly hidden beneath the accumulated cairn material. A low crescent of that same material along the southern side hints that the original mound may have been substantially larger than what survives today. Writing in 1934, a researcher named Bowman noted that the covering stone of the cist was still lying nearby at that point, measuring approximately three feet by two feet ten inches and three inches thick. A possible candidate for this capstone, a slab around 0.4 metres by 0.36 metres, sits at the eastern end of the cairn, though its dimensions do not quite match Bowman's account, leaving the identification uncertain.

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