Pit-burial, Cornagarvoge, Co. Monaghan
Co. Monaghan |
Burial Sites
A farmer ploughing a ridge in Cornagarvoge, County Monaghan, turned up something that had been waiting quietly under a flagstone for an unknown length of time: a small pit containing ashes.
No monument, no marker, no name. Just a covering stone and whatever cremated remains lay beneath it, tucked into the landscape on a northwest-to-southeast running ridge.
Pit-burials of this kind, where cremated remains are placed in a simple cut in the ground and sealed with a stone, appear across Ireland from the Bronze Age onwards, and they are often discovered not through deliberate excavation but through exactly this sort of accident. What makes the Cornagarvoge find quietly interesting is its proximity to a ringfort, the remains of a roughly circular enclosed settlement, typically dating from the early medieval period, that sits on or very near the same ground. Whether the burial predates the ringfort, post-dates it, or has any relationship to it at all is not recorded. The two simply share a landscape, and the connection, if there is one, remains open.