At Maganey in County Kildare, the ground gave up something quietly remarkable: a polygonal cist, a small stone-lined burial box assembled from several upright slabs, containing a cremation over which an Encrusted Urn had been placed upside down. The inversion was deliberate, a funerary practice known from Bronze Age Ireland in which the ceramic vessel, decorated with applied ridges of clay, was set mouth-downward over the cremated remains as a kind of cover or container. That single grave would have been notable enough on its own.

Excavation in 1960, reported in the Journal of the Royal Society of Antiquaries of Ireland, revealed that it was not an isolated burial at all. Alongside the cist were further discoveries: another cist, two cremations covered by small piles of stones, and extended inhumations, burials of unburnt bodies laid out at full length, some left without any stone covering or marker. Taken together, the variation in burial rite, cremation alongside inhumation, cists alongside simple stone cairns alongside unprotected graves, points to a Bronze Age cemetery rather than a single episode of burial. Communities of this period did not always observe a uniform funerary practice, and Maganey seems to reflect that complexity, different treatments for different individuals, or perhaps for different generations of use, all within the same ground.