Cist, Knock, Co. Mayo

Co. Mayo |

Burial Sites

Cist, Knock, Co. Mayo

Beneath a cairn at Knock in County Mayo, a stone box holds the memory of someone long forgotten.

A cist, which is a small prehistoric burial chamber built from upright slabs and sealed with a capstone, was recorded near the centre of the cairn, measuring 1.4 metres in length and 0.9 metres in depth, with a flat stone floor beneath its covering slab. It is the kind of structure designed to contain a body, or the remains of one, in a carefully enclosed space, modest in scale but deliberate in construction.

The record of this cist comes from unpublished notes made by a researcher named Aldridge in 1960. What he found, or what he was told, included a detail that quietly complicates the picture: bones had already been removed from the site by the time of his visit, or at some point before it. When, by whom, and under what circumstances is not recorded. The cairn itself, a mound of stones that would originally have marked and protected the burial beneath, is catalogued as part of the broader archaeological landscape around Ballinrobe, Lough Mask, and Lough Carra, an area of Mayo with a dense concentration of prehistoric and early historic remains.

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