Flat cemetery, Baysrath, Co. Kilkenny

Co. Kilkenny |

Burial Grounds

Flat cemetery, Baysrath, Co. Kilkenny

A field outside Baysrath, Co. Kilkenny once held the cremated remains of adults and children, buried in shallow pits with no obvious arrangement, no marker stones, and nothing to distinguish the ground above them from any other patch of Irish farmland.

That is precisely what makes this kind of burial site so quietly unsettling: a "flat cemetery", as archaeologists call it, is a burial ground with no surface monument, no mound, no enclosing ditch visible to the eye. The dead were simply placed in the earth and left there, invisible to every subsequent generation until machinery or excavation brought them back to light.

The site came to attention during road improvement works on the N9/N10 Kilcullen to Waterford route, when excavations carried out in 2006 and 2007 revealed nine subcircular pits across an area of roughly ten by twelve metres. The pits were shallow, averaging around thirteen centimetres deep and forty centimetres across, and were cut directly into subsoil just beneath the topsoil. Inside them were charcoal and the cremated remains of both adults and children. Radiocarbon dating placed the burials between approximately 1312 and 1048 Cal BC, situating this cemetery firmly in the Bronze Age. Four of the pits lay inside the boundary of a later Iron Age palisaded enclosure, a timber fence or barrier defining a defined space, and four lay outside it, which raises the possibility that the enclosure was built with some awareness of what the ground already contained, though no pattern in the pit arrangement has been identified. The cemetery was not isolated: it sat within a cluster of monuments spanning roughly 1.8 hectares, with activity ranging from the Late Neolithic through to the early medieval period, suggesting that this particular stretch of County Kilkenny drew people back, generation after generation, across several millennia.

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