Cremation pit, Rathcannon, Co. Limerick

Co. Limerick |

Burial Sites

Cremation pit, Rathcannon, Co. Limerick

Somewhere in a field of ordinary pasture in County Limerick, about 450 metres north of Rathcannon Castle, a Bronze Age community buried their dead with a quiet, systematic care that took three thousand years and a gas pipeline to bring to light.

The site never appeared on any Ordnance Survey historic maps, and nothing on the surface would have suggested what lay beneath. It was only in 2002, during topsoil-stripping for the Bord Gáis Éireann Pipeline to the West, that archaeologist Ken Wiggins first identified the site and recognised it for what it was.

Kate Taylor excavated the cemetery in 2002, uncovering twelve definite cremation burials arranged in small, carefully cut pits, circular or oval in plan, ranging from roughly 26 centimetres to 90 centimetres wide and up to 60 centimetres deep. The fills were dark, silty, and rich in charcoal, with crushed and cremated bone fragments concentrated toward the base of each pit. Six of the burials had been deliberately masked with a layer of orange-brown clay, rendering them nearly indistinguishable from the surrounding natural geology, which raises the question of whether this concealment was itself part of the burial rite. Most of the pits had been dug close together but avoided cutting into one another, implying that their positions were somehow marked and remembered across generations. One pit, numbered 11, appears to have been placed with great deliberateness between two earlier burials, possibly to forge a symbolic connection between the dead. It also contained a hidden chamber cut into its western side, just wide enough for an adult hand, packed with a concentrated deposit of bone, as though someone had tucked a private portion of the remains away. Radiocarbon dating of charcoal from one of the burials placed the cemetery between 1520 and 1210 cal. BC, and pottery fragments recovered from the largest pit were identified by Anna Brindley as belonging to a single, incomplete vessel of Middle to Late Bronze Age date.

The site has been fully excavated and is no longer visible on the ground or in aerial imagery, so there is nothing physically to see at the location today. Its value lies entirely in what was recorded during the 2002 excavation, documented in Kate Taylor's published reports. For those following the archaeology of the Irish Bronze Age, the detailed excavation record is where the real detail resides, particularly the evidence of ritual complexity, the masked burials, the hidden chamber, and the two pits that may have held no human remains at all, perhaps serving instead as symbolic graves or boundary markers for the cemetery itself.

Rated 0 out of 5

Visitor Notes

Review type for post source and places source type not found
Added by
Picture of Pete F
Pete F
IrishHistory.com is passionate about helping people discover and connect with the rich stories of their local communities.
Please use the form below to submit any photos you may have of Cremation pit, Rathcannon, Co. Limerick. We're happy to take any suggested edits you may have too. Please be advised it will take us some time to get to these submissions. Thank you.
Name
Email
Message
Upload images/documents
Maximum file size: 100 MB
If you'd like to add an image or a PDF please do it here.

Advertisement