When a housing development was being planned on the western edge of a broad marshy basin at Kilbarry in County Waterford, archaeological excavations revealed something that had been lying quietly beneath the ground for thousands of years: a flat cemetery, so called because, unlike the mounded barrows or ring-ditches more commonly associated with prehistoric burial, it left no surface trace whatsoever. Nothing above the ground would ever have suggested what was there.

The excavations, carried out under licence in 2018 and published by Pollock in 2021, uncovered a cluster of burials spanning what appears to be a long stretch of prehistoric use. At the centre was a stone-lined cist, a small rectangular grave box roughly 0.85 metres long and 0.4 metres wide, missing its capstone and apparently robbed of its original occupant at some point in antiquity. The absence of cremated bone in the silt fill points to a crouched inhumation, the burial position typical of the Bronze Age in Ireland, where the body was laid on its side with the knees drawn up. Fragments of a Bronze Age vase urn were recovered from the fill, and a single sherd of Neolithic pottery turned up behind the cist, hinting at an even earlier human presence on the spot. Less than two metres to the south-west, a pit burial held the cremated remains of what was mostly an adult, placed inside an upright urn that had been truncated almost to its base. Mingled in with the adult bone were teeth consistent with a juvenile, possibly some animal fragments, and a bipolar flint core, a piece of worked stone used as a tool. Seven metres further west, a second cremation, the burnt bones of a young adult aged roughly twenty to forty years and possibly a juvenile, lay in a shallow oval pit barely five centimetres deep. Some thirty metres to the south, three small pits containing scorched soil and a possible mix of burnt human and animal bone may represent an even earlier phase of activity on the site.

The cemetery sits approximately 130 metres north-west of Kilbarry church and its associated graveyard, a site later connected to a Knights Templar preceptory and the manorial centre that grew up around it. The proximity is probably coincidental rather than continuous, but it gives the landscape an uncommon depth: Bronze Age cremations, a robbed-out cist, and a medieval military-religious order, all within a short walk of one another across what was once marshy ground.