Pit-burial, Letterkeen, Co. Mayo

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Burial Sites

Pit-burial, Letterkeen, Co. Mayo

On a boggy plateau in County Mayo, hemmed in by the Goulaun River and the rising slope of Letterkeen Hill, a small oval pit once held the compressed remains of a Bronze Age adult: cremated bone, red burnt clay, and charcoal, packed tightly into the earth and partly sealed with a single stone.

There is nothing monumental about the burial itself, and that quiet scale is part of what makes it interesting. Whoever was placed here was not alone.

When archaeologists Ó Ríordáin and Mac Dermott excavated the site in 1950, they found the pit sitting directly above the capstone of a cist, a type of stone-lined grave box common in prehistoric Ireland and Britain. Close by lay a possible burial cairn, two further cists, and a second pit burial of the same general kind, suggesting this plateau was used deliberately and repeatedly as a place to inter the dead during the Bronze Age. Centuries later, the whole cluster of burials was buried again, so to speak, beneath a rath, an enclosed farmstead of the early medieval period typically defined by one or more earthen banks and ditches. The effect is one of layered occupation, each era settling over the last without, apparently, fully erasing it. That a rath was built here at all implies the site remained a meaningful piece of ground long after the Bronze Age burials had receded from living memory, though whether those later inhabitants understood what lay beneath them is impossible to say.

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