It sits on a gentle south-south-westerly facing slope, in ordinary pasture, and it never appeared on any Ordnance Survey historic mapping. Nothing marked it out as a place where people had been bringing their dead. Yet beneath that grass, archaeologists found evidence of a cremation cemetery used across multiple distinct periods, a site that had been entirely invisible to the historical record until construction work threatened to erase it for good.

The site came to light in 2003, when archaeologist Flor Hurley was carrying out monitoring work, the routine watching of groundworks during development, ahead of a housing scheme called Glantan. Hurley identified the site under licence 03E1382, and Niamh O'Callaghan subsequently led a full excavation under licence 03E1717 later the same year. In the western portion of the site, designated Area 1, the team uncovered seven roughly circular cremation pits, each averaging around half a metre in diameter and roughly twenty centimetres deep. A substantial quantity of cremated bone came from four of the pits, and occasional sherds of pottery were recovered from three of them. The archaeology pointed to three separate phases of burial activity. The earliest involved a linear feature, perhaps a shallow trench or cut, into which two cremations had been placed at the base. One of those cremations was associated with two stake-holes, suggesting some kind of marker or small structure once stood there, while the other was surrounded by a circle of ten stake-holes, hinting at a more deliberate enclosure or ritual arrangement around the burial. A second phase saw further cremations cut into the fill of an existing feature, and a final, solitary cremation represented the last recorded use of the site.

Because this is a site that existed beneath a field scheduled for development, there is nothing to see above ground today. The Glantan housing scheme proceeded, and the archaeological features were recorded and removed in the process. The value of sites like this one lies less in any surviving physical presence and more in what the excavation revealed: that cremation cemeteries, flat cemeteries without mounds or enclosures to signal their presence, can persist invisibly in the landscape for centuries or millennia, surfacing only when a digger blade catches something unexpected. For anyone interested in the archaeology of the Castletroy area, the published monitoring report by Hurley and the excavation licence records held by the National Monuments Service are the best routes into the detail of what was found here.