Cremation pit, Kilbane, Co. Limerick
Co. Limerick |
Burial Sites
In a quiet field of low-lying pasture near the Groody River in County Limerick, a small patch of earth holds evidence of ancient fire and human remains.
The pit itself is modest to the point of near-invisibility: roughly a metre long, seventy centimetres wide, and only ten centimetres deep. What marks it out is what those dimensions contained, and what the soil itself recorded. The sides and base of the pit were stained a bright red from oxidised boulder clay, the characteristic signature of intense heat applied directly in place. This kind of reddening, known as in situ burning, tells archaeologists that the fire was lit inside the pit rather than elsewhere, making the pit itself the site of cremation.
The feature was entirely unknown before 2002, appearing on none of the Ordnance Survey's historic mapping of the area. It came to light that year during archaeological monitoring carried out under licence by Collins along the line of a drainage wayleave, one of those corridor-like strips of land set aside for utility infrastructure that occasionally cut through ground that has never been formally surveyed. Once identified, the pit was excavated under a separate licence by Cummins, whose report recorded the charcoal-rich black fill and the presence of a few tiny fragments of burnt bone. No artefacts were recovered, which is not unusual for cremation pits of this type; the absence of objects makes precise dating difficult, and the record offers no firm period of origin. A second pit and a shallow deposit recorded under the reference LI005-084 lie approximately a hundred metres to the south, suggesting this was not an isolated event in the landscape.
The site sits on a gentle west-facing slope roughly 315 metres to the north-east of the Groody River, and there is nothing to mark it above ground. It lies in ordinary agricultural land, and access would depend on landowner permission. For anyone interested in the archaeology of cremation and prehistoric funerary practice, the value here is less in visiting the spot than in understanding what infrastructure monitoring can turn up in unremarkable terrain. The full excavation record, compiled by Alison McQueen, Vera Rahilly, and Caimin O'Brien, was uploaded to the national monuments database in June 2020.