Pit-burial, Smarmore, Co. Louth

Beneath a flat rectangular stone lay a small rock-cut pit, barely sixty centimetres across at the top and narrowing to thirty centimetres at the base, no deeper than half a metre. It is the kind of grave that holds almost nothing and yet says a great deal.

The site was excavated by A.T. Lucas following its discovery, and what he found inside was characteristic of Bronze Age funerary practice in Ireland. A Cordoned Urn, a type of ceramic vessel decorated with applied clay ridges or cordons encircling the body of the pot, had been placed upside down over a cremated deposit. The cremated remains were those of an adult, possibly male. The inversion of the urn over the cremation is a recurring feature of this burial tradition; the vessel appears to have functioned as a cover or container rather than simply a grave-good. The Smarmore pit is modest in scale, but the precision of its construction, a shaped rock-cut hollow sealed with a stone lid, suggests deliberate and considered burial rather than hasty interment.