Flat cemetery, Ballyenahan, Co. Cork

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Burial Grounds

Flat cemetery, Ballyenahan, Co. Cork

A gravel ridge on the eastern bank of the Funshion River in north Cork is not the kind of place one would expect to find a Bronze Age burial ground, yet that is precisely what quarry workers uncovered in 1949 when their machinery began cutting into the earth.

What emerged was a flat cemetery, a type of burial site that, as the name suggests, carries no visible surface monument and would have been entirely invisible to anyone walking the land above it. Seventeen graves are thought to have been present in total, though only six were formally investigated. The variety contained within those six alone is striking: stone-lined box graves known as cists, simple pit burials, both cremation and inhumation, adults and young children, all interred within the same modest ridge.

The six graves were recorded by Fahy in 1954 and reveal a community that clearly observed distinct funerary customs, sometimes within the same burial ground. One grave held the cremated remains of a young adult, probably female, mixed with sixteen bronze rivets, the kind of metal fittings associated with wooden or leather objects that have long since perished. Another contained the cremated bones of two children, aged roughly four and between eight and ten years, laid together in a polygonal cist, a small stone-lined chamber with an irregular shape, and sealed under two large boulders placed over the capstone. A third grave held the crouched inhumation of a robust adult male, between twenty-five and fifty years of age, accompanied by a fragment of a Food Vessel, the decorated ceramic ware characteristic of the early Bronze Age in Ireland and Britain. Most dramatically, a large pit burial held a tall adult male covered with boulders and accompanied by a bronze dagger. A separate pit contained the cremated remains of a child aged between two and seven years, buried alongside an inverted Food Vessel Bowl decorated with zig-zag bands, plain ribs, and tooth comb impressions in a tripartite arrangement. A further Food Vessel Vase, biconical in form with hatched triangles and herringbone bands pressed into its surface, was recovered from somewhere within the cemetery, though its precise findspot was not established. Taken together, the graves point to use during the earlier Bronze Age, broadly the second millennium BC, when flat cemeteries of this kind were a common but archaeologically elusive form of burial across Ireland.

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