Cremation pit, Raheennamadra, Co. Limerick

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Burial Sites

Cremation pit, Raheennamadra, Co. Limerick

Somewhere beneath a field of reclaimed pasture in County Limerick, the cremated remains of an adult male were placed in the ground alongside a plain, undecorated pot.

There was no enclosure, no monument, no marker that archaeology has yet detected. Just two shallow pits, lying roughly 8.7 metres apart in otherwise unremarkable land, belonging to a burial tradition that left almost nothing behind.

The pits came to light in 1986, not through any dedicated antiquarian survey but as a consequence of gas pipeline work, identified under BGE reference 2/20/1. Archaeologist Claire Walsh directed the excavations, and the findings were subsequently published in Gowen's 1988 report on the pipeline corridor. The two pits are recorded together under the site reference LI049-014001 and LI049-014002. Pit A measured 68 centimetres by 55 centimetres and survived to a depth of just 22 centimetres, heavily truncated by later agricultural activity, with topsoil lying up to 50 centimetres deep across the area. Within it, Walsh recovered abundant fragments of cremated bone alongside the badly decayed remains of a coarse ceramic vessel. The surrounding ground was cleaned back by machine under supervision, but no additional features were found nearby. The site sits approximately 130 metres north of the townland boundary with Mitchelstowndown East. Cremation pits of this type, where the burned remains of the dead are placed directly into the earth, sometimes with a pot and sometimes without, are a recurring but often poorly understood feature of Irish prehistory, frequently appearing without the ring-barrows or cairns that more visibly mark other burial sites from the same broad period.

There is nothing to see at ground level today. The site lies in reclaimed agricultural land, and without the pipeline excavation it would almost certainly have remained unknown. Its value is in the record rather than the visit, and the published coordinates and maps in Gowen's 1988 report remain the most reliable means of locating it precisely. For anyone researching the archaeology of the Limerick gas pipeline corridor more broadly, Walsh's 1987 report and the Gowen volume together provide the fullest available account of what was found across this stretch of ground.

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