Pit-burial, Glenacunna, Co. Tipperary
Co. Tipperary |
Burial Sites
In a field of undulating pasture in Glenacunna, County Tipperary, a small circle of stone once held the cremated remains of a single adult, undisturbed for roughly three and a half thousand years.
In 1975, bulldozing work broke open the pit grave, bringing to light what little survived of a burial that had been quietly sealed into the ground during the Bronze Age. The find was recorded by Twohig in 1976, and while the disturbance was significant, enough remained to piece together the basic form of the grave.
The pit was roughly circular, approximately 0.75 metres in diameter, and its interior had been lined, at least partially, with small stone slabs and dry-stone walling. That lining is a detail worth pausing on: it suggests a deliberate act of construction rather than a simple hole dug in haste, even if the whole structure was modest in scale. The cremated remains of one adult were found inside. About twelve metres to the west lies a double cist burial, a cist being a type of small stone-lined box grave used across Bronze Age Ireland and Britain, sometimes covered with a capstone and sometimes placed beneath a cairn or mound. The proximity of the two sites is what provides the pit burial with its probable date, since cist burials in Ireland are most commonly associated with the earlier part of the Bronze Age, broadly the second millennium BC. Whether the two burials were contemporary, or whether the pit grave was placed nearby in deliberate acknowledgement of an existing monument, is something the surviving evidence cannot answer.
