When a County Kildare family began preparing the ground for a new house in 1998, the construction work briefly interrupted something that had been quietly undisturbed for roughly sixteen centuries. Archaeological monitors brought in to watch over the groundworks found, beneath the topsoil, two bowl-shaped pits filled with charcoal, ash, and burnt bone. The kind of discovery that rarely makes headlines, it is precisely the sort of find that quietly reshapes what we know about how ordinary people in early medieval Ireland treated their dead.

Both pits had been cut into the subsoil at Rathmore, one to a depth of around 0.6 metres and the other to about 0.5 metres. The deeper of the two contained layered deposits of charcoal, red oxidised earth, and ash, with a considerable quantity of burnt bone distributed through the various fills. The shallower pit held a different pattern: redeposited natural material making up most of the fill, with a concentrated terminal deposit of charcoal and ash at its centre, and only a small number of bone fragments. Pit-burials involving cremated remains, where the bones of the dead are placed in a pit along with the debris of a funeral pyre, were practised across Ireland from the Bronze Age onward, though the tradition persisted in places well into the early Christian period. Radiocarbon dating of charcoal samples from these features produced a date range of AD 230 to 420, placing the burials in the late Iron Age or very early medieval period, a time when Ireland sat at the cusp of the changes that Christian missionaries would bring. No further archaeological material was found in the surrounding area once monitoring continued.