Cist, Cools, Co. Kerry

Co. Kerry |

Burial Sites

Cist, Cools, Co. Kerry

In the rough pasture of Cools, County Kerry, there is a burial that has effectively vanished.

Not destroyed in any documented way, not excavated and rehoused elsewhere, simply gone from view, leaving nothing to mark the spot where a prehistoric cist once lay. A cist is a small stone-lined box grave, typically formed from upright slabs with a capstone, used throughout Ireland during the Bronze Age to inter the dead, sometimes with accompanying pottery or personal objects. This one has left no trace above ground at all.

What is known comes from a single act of recording. In the 1930s, a Captain D. B. O'Connell noted the presence of the cist here, and that observation was preserved in the Sites and Monuments Record. Whether the structure was already partially buried at that point, or whether it has since been removed or collapsed into the earth, is not recorded. What remains is the landscape it occupied: rough grazing land with an open view south-east toward The Paps of Dana, the twin-peaked hills in the Derrynasaggart Mountains whose profile has given them their name since at least early medieval times. The relationship between such burial sites and prominent landmarks was rarely accidental in prehistory, and the alignment here, deliberate or not, places this anonymous grave in a line of sight to one of the most recognisable natural features in Kerry.

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Pete F
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