Yet on a gently south-west-facing slope in what is now Castletroy, on the northern side of Schoolhouse Road, the ground once held the carefully arranged remains of the dead, placed there sometime in the Late Bronze Age, roughly three thousand years ago, and forgotten so completely that only the disruption of a modern housing development brought them back to light.

The site was first noticed in 2003 by archaeologist Flor Hurley during monitoring work carried out under licence ahead of a housing scheme called Glantan. What Hurley identified prompted a full excavation later that same year, led by Niamh O'Callaghan. Within an area measuring approximately twelve metres by six, the excavation uncovered ninety circular pits, packed into a roughly rectangular arrangement with no sign of a surrounding ditch, bank, or any above-ground marker of any kind. A flat cemetery, in archaeological terms, is exactly this: a burial site that announces nothing of itself to the landscape, leaving the dead interred without the enclosures or earthworks that more conspicuous prehistoric monuments tend to carry. Of the ninety pits, seventy-eight contained fragments of cremated bone, the remains of people who had been burned before burial. One cremation had been placed inside a ceramic vessel and covered with a capstone; the pot itself barely survived conservation, but the stone lid had done enough to protect what was inside. Twenty-two pits yielded pottery fragments, and six contained substantial quantities of sherds. A preliminary assessment by prehistoric pottery specialist Helen Roche pointed to a Late Bronze Age date for the assemblage.

The site itself no longer exists as an open or accessible feature; it lies within land that was developed for housing following the 2003 excavations, and there is nothing on the surface to mark where the pits once were. Its significance is archival rather than visible. For anyone interested in the archaeology of the Castletroy area, the excavation report and the monitoring record by Hurley are the primary sources, and the site serves as a reminder of how much of the prehistoric landscape of the Limerick suburbs survived, invisibly, just beneath the topsoil until construction finally reached it.