What is recorded here

Dog’s Bay in County Galway keeps a buried adult inside its eroding dunes, waiting for the sea to reveal what human hands once hid. The bones lay flat on dark soil before sand swallowed them, pointing south toward open water while the former island merged into the beach. The dunes still breathe out that life, one handful at a time, as if the coast cannot stop returning what it took.

This burial was exposed at a depth of 1.1m from the top of the eroding dunes along the N face of a former rocky island that is now part of the tombola at Cuan an Mhada/Dog’s Bay. It was orientated N-S with the head to the S and it appears to have been laid on its back in an extended position. No grave cut was apparent and the burial appeared to have been placed on a deposit of dark soil and then covered with sand. The fusion of the skull bones suggested that the remains were those of a mature adult, possible a female (information from the National Museum of Ireland, February 2016). Compiled by: Olive Alcock Date of upload: 10 October 2016

A Neolithic cist burial; significant as a rare example of early prehistoric funerary practice in a coastal, possibly island, context.

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