But when groundwork began on the Greystones Southern Access Route in County Wicklow, excavators uncovered something that had been quietly underground for roughly three thousand years: a circular enclosure containing the cremated remains of the dead, arranged within Late Bronze Age ceramic vessels.

The site at Priestsnewtown centred on an annular ditch, meaning a ring-shaped ditch, roughly thirteen metres in diameter and between nineteen and forty-three centimetres deep. Inside that enclosed space, archaeologists recorded twenty-two post-holes, the traces of timber uprights that once formed some kind of structure, along with three cremation deposits, each placed in a vessel dating to the Late Bronze Age, a period spanning roughly 1200 to 600 BC. Outside the ring ditch, the picture became more complex: further pits, additional post-holes, another cremation also contained in a Late Bronze Age vessel, and a series of linear ditches, one of which ran beyond the boundary of the road development and so could not be fully investigated. The site was excavated under licence 04E0401 and the findings were published by Wiggins in 2007. What emerges is a funerary landscape of some complexity, where the enclosure itself appears to have been only one element of a wider activity taking place across the area.