Burial, Coolronan, Co. Meath
Co. Meath |
Burial Sites
Sand extraction is not usually the business of archaeology, but in April 1966 a sandpit near Ballivor in County Meath yielded something considerably older than the material being dug out of it.
Workers uncovered six human skeletons, and what made the find arresting was not merely the number of bodies but the deliberate order in which they had been placed. All six lay supine, meaning flat on their backs, with their arms at their sides, and all were aligned on a south-to-north axis. They had been arranged in a row.
The six individuals represented four adults and two children, and all appeared to be male. Animal bones were also present among the remains, suggesting either a burial custom involving offerings or, at minimum, that the human and animal deposits had been treated as part of the same assemblage. The supine position and orderly alignment point towards a degree of intentional ceremony, though the precise period to which the burials belong is not recorded in detail. The south-to-north orientation is somewhat unusual; Christian burial convention in Ireland typically placed the body on an east-to-west axis, so the alignment here may hint at a pre-Christian or at least non-standard funerary tradition. The site at Coolronan sits within a county that has long been associated with early medieval and prehistoric activity, and chance discoveries of this kind during agricultural or industrial groundwork have added many otherwise unknown sites to the archaeological record.