Yet that is precisely what emerged at Richview House, Bellvue Hill, in Delgany, County Wicklow, when development work in October 2018 prompted a four-day excavation that would eventually confirm the site as only the second Iron Age cremation pit ever recorded in the whole of County Wicklow.

The excavation, carried out under licence by archaeologist Yvonne Whitty, uncovered the cremated remains of five adults and a juvenile, buried in a compact cluster measuring just six metres east to west by two metres north to south, only 0.35 metres beneath the topsoil. There was no enclosing ring-ditch, no cairn, no mound of any kind to mark the spot above ground. What made the site particularly revealing was the evidence of two distinct phases of use, separated by many centuries. Radiocarbon dating placed the most westerly burial, Burial 5, firmly in the Late Bronze Age, dating to between 1052 and 906 BC. The most easterly pit, Burial 1, which sat apart from the others by nearly two metres, dated to the Iron Age, between 242 and 382 AD. The wood chosen for the funeral pyres differed between the phases too: oak predominated in the three burials associated with the Late Bronze Age, while ash characterised the two Iron Age burials. That distinction in fuel choice was not incidental; it helped Whitty establish the phasing of the site even before the radiocarbon results came in. The charcoal analysis also contributed something broader, adding to existing pollen-based evidence for climate deterioration in the Delgany area during both the Late Bronze Age and the Iron Age. When the Delgany site is counted alongside the sixty-eight other examples already on record, it brings the total number of confirmed Iron Age cremation burial sites across Ireland to sixty-nine, a figure that speaks to how slowly this particular category of monument has been accumulating.