Pit, Ballincurra, Co. Limerick

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Settlement Sites

Pit, Ballincurra, Co. Limerick

A field in County Limerick holds a secret it has already given up entirely.

Somewhere beneath the pasture grass, roughly thirty metres south of a quiet stream, two large pits once sat less than a metre apart, invisible to the Ordnance Survey mapmakers who recorded everything else around them and leaving no trace on aerial photography. The only reason anyone knows they existed at all is that a gas pipeline came through.

In 2002, topsoil-stripping for the Bord Gáis Éireann Pipeline to the West brought archaeologist Ken Wiggins to this part of Ballincurra, where he identified a cluster of six features in the area designated BGE 3/77/27-29. One of those features was subsequently excavated by Kate Taylor under licence 02E0470. What she found were two large conical pits side by side. The western pit was 1.9 metres in diameter and 1.4 metres deep, with four distinct fills. The lowest of these contained a notably high concentration of charcoal, though there was no evidence of burning having taken place within the pit itself, suggesting the charcoal arrived there from elsewhere, perhaps as deliberate backfill or incidental deposit. Above that primary layer, silty clays accumulated in successive fills. A possible recut was identified in the uppermost fill, meaning the pit appears to have been partially reopened at some point after its initial use, and it was within the silty clay of that recut that excavators recovered a small crescentic flint scraper. A flint scraper of this kind is a hand-held prehistoric tool, typically shaped by careful knapping to produce a curved working edge used for tasks like processing hides or wood. Ninety metres to the west, a separate enclosure had been recorded, though its relationship to the pits remains unclear.

There is nothing to see at Ballincurra today. The monument has been fully excavated and the pipeline works long since completed and grassed over. No surface feature survives, and the site does not appear on historic maps. Its value now lies entirely in the excavation record, particularly Taylor's published summary from 2004, which places it within the broader pattern of pipeline archaeology that transformed understanding of the Irish midlands and west in the early 2000s. For anyone interested in how infrastructure projects routinely intersect with prehistoric remains, Ballincurra is a useful, if understated, example of archaeology recovered almost by accident, documented carefully, and then returned to silence.

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