Pit-burial, Kilbride, Co. Wicklow
Co. Wicklow |
Burial Sites
Beneath a field in Kilbride, Co. Wicklow, lies a small stone-lined pit containing the cremated remains of a person whose name, age, and story are entirely unknown.
There is nothing to see from the surface, no mound, no marker, no visible disturbance in the grass. The burial simply exists, a few inches underground, catalogued and quietly forgotten by the landscape above it.
The pit was found just below the surface of a field, its walls lined with stones and its contents the burned remnants of a human cremation. Cremation burials of this type, where the dead were burned and the remains placed in a pit or vessel, are broadly associated with prehistoric funerary practice in Ireland, though without more detailed excavation data it is difficult to assign this particular example to a precise period. The find is recorded under NMI reference 1959-18, suggesting it came to institutional attention around that year, and is discussed in a 1969 paper by Herity. Beyond those bare coordinates of time and scholarship, the record offers little more.