Cremated remains, Cush, Co. Limerick
Co. Limerick |
Burial Sites
Tucked beneath a large capstone near the entrance of an ancient ringfort at Cush in County Limerick, a small deposit of cremated human bone was found resting in a way that suggested the burial had already been disturbed long before any archaeologist arrived.
Some of the remains lay beyond the protection of the stone entirely, scattered outside the area the capstone could have covered. It is a modest, slightly melancholy detail, but one that says something about how the past reaches us: rarely intact, rarely complete.
The burial, recorded as Burial No. V, was uncovered during excavations carried out between 1934 and 1935 by the archaeologist Séan P. Ó Ríordáin, whose findings were published in 1940. The site itself is a bivallate ringfort, meaning it is enclosed by two concentric earthen banks rather than the single bank more commonly encountered across Ireland. Ringforts were typically built and occupied during the early medieval period, functioning as defended farmsteads for a family and their livestock. The cremation burial was located in the western quadrant of the fort, positioned beneath two large stones visible near the entrance. Ó Ríordáin noted that the capstone rested on an irregular cluster of supporting stones, and he was candid about what was missing: the quantity of cremated remains was small, and he suspected that some of the deposit had been removed at an earlier point, drawing a comparison with Burial No. 4 from the same site, where most of an accompanying urn had also disappeared before excavation began.
Cush is a townland in south County Limerick, and the ringfort complex there contains several recorded features across a relatively compact area. Visitors interested in the Ó Ríordáin excavations would benefit from consulting the published report alongside the site's entry in the national monuments record, where plans and photographs from the original fieldwork are referenced. The burial itself is not a visible surface feature in any dramatic sense; what remains to be seen is the broader landscape of the fort, with its earthworks and entrance area where those two large stones once marked something now only partially understood.