Pit-burial, Grange, Co. Dublin

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Burial Sites

Pit-burial, Grange, Co. Dublin

An oval pit, barely a metre long and thirty centimetres deep, turned up during pre-development testing in Grange, County Dublin, in 2005, and what it contained was enough to mark it as something older and more deliberate than routine soil disturbance.

Scattered through its fill were occasional flecks of burnt bone and charcoal, the faint traces of cremated remains that suggest a burial, or at least a funerary deposit of some kind. A second pit had been cut into the first at a later date, and that one held a charcoal-rich fill along with its own fragments of burnt bone, as though the site had been returned to, or reused, across some stretch of time.

The find was documented by Elder in 2007, following the 2005 testing programme that preceded development in the area. Pit burials of this type, where cremated bone and charcoal are deposited in a simple cut in the ground rather than beneath a mound or within a formal cemetery, are known from prehistoric Ireland across a broad span of time, from the Bronze Age onward. They can be easy to miss and easy to disturb, which is precisely why pre-development archaeological testing exists. The dimensions recorded here, 1.01 metres in length, 0.67 metres in width, and 0.30 metres in depth, are modest even by the standards of such deposits, and the bone quantity appears to have been slight rather than a full cremation burial. Whether this represents a token deposit, a partial interment, or simply what survived centuries of soil activity is not clear from the available record.

The precise location of this monument within Grange is, as the record compiled by Geraldine Stout notes, now unknown. It may have been fully excavated during the testing phase, or its position simply not carried forward in a way that allows it to be pinpointed on a map today. There is, in other words, nothing to visit in the conventional sense. What remains is the documentation itself, a brief entry that captures the moment when routine groundwork brushed against evidence of the dead, and the record was made before the ground moved on.

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Grange, Co. Dublin
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