Cist, Drummoher, Co. Clare

Co. Clare |

Burial Sites

Cist, Drummoher, Co. Clare

At Drummoher in County Clare, a prehistoric burial arrangement sits at the centre of a cairn, its stone slabs barely breaking the surface of the ground.

What makes it quietly arresting is the incompleteness, not as a result of damage or neglect, but as a genuine open question: the structure may not end where it appears to end.

The feature is a cist, a box-like grave formed from upright stone slabs, of the kind used in Ireland during the Bronze Age to hold human remains, sometimes accompanied by pottery or personal objects. Here, two parallel stones define the burial space, one on the north side measuring 0.75 metres in length and one on the south side at 1.1 metres, both roughly five centimetres wide and both just barely protruding above the ground. They sit 0.85 metres apart, and while they run parallel to one another, they are not exactly opposite, which gives the arrangement a slightly off-kilter quality. Further to the west, smaller stones are visible on both sides, and it remains unclear whether the cist once extended further in that direction or whether those stones belong to the structure at all. The whole thing sits within a cairn, a mound of stones heaped over a burial, which would once have made the grave both visible in the landscape and deliberately marked out.

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