It is rather more unusual for them to uncover the cremated remains of the dead. At Clyderragh in County Cork, precisely that happened when workers laying a high-voltage electricity line between Charleville and Newmarket broke into a deposit of charcoal-rich soil containing cremated bone, the quiet residue of a burial that had lain undisturbed, possibly for millennia, beneath the north Cork farmland.

The find came to light during archaeological monitoring of the 110kV line development, a process by which qualified archaeologists accompany construction work in areas of potential sensitivity, watching the exposed soil for anything that warrants closer attention. In this case, the monitoring paid off. The deposit, recorded by Lyttleton in 2006, is consistent with a pit-burial, a relatively common prehistoric funerary practice in which cremated remains were placed, sometimes with grave goods and sometimes without, into a cut in the ground. What lends the site a particular quiet resonance is its proximity to a rath located roughly fifty metres to the west-northwest. A rath is a roughly circular enclosure, typically defined by an earthen bank and ditch, associated with early medieval settlement in Ireland, broadly the period from the fifth to the twelfth century. Whether the burial predates the rath, postdates it, or bears any relationship to whoever once lived within that enclosure, the available evidence does not say. The two features simply sit near one another in the landscape, each carrying its own silence.