One was an adult male; the other was a child. Their cremated remains were placed inside a ceramic urn and a smaller vase, both vessels inverted, mouth-down, over the bones. What makes this quietly remarkable is not only the antiquity of the burial, but the fact that it was found at all, tucked into a site that belonged, on the surface at least, to a completely different era.

The pit, no more than 63 centimetres across at its widest, came to light during excavation of a trivallate early medieval enclosure, a ringfort-type site defined by three concentric banks or ditches. The burial sat at the southern edge of the innermost enclosure, suggesting that the early medieval occupants of the site were, knowingly or not, building around ground that had already been used for the dead roughly two millennia before them. The encrusted urn, a coarse ceramic type typical of Early Bronze Age Ireland, carried a running chevron pattern and decorative bosses with incised panels of lines below, though its base had been damaged. The accompanying vessel, described as a bipartite vase with an everted rim and all-over incised decoration, was found complete. Stylistic analysis of both pieces, carried out by M. Cahill and published in 2011 as part of a major study of National Museum of Ireland burial excavations, places them in the period roughly 2000 to 1830 BC. The practice of inverting vessels over cremated remains was common in the Early Bronze Age, the upturned pot acting as a kind of protective cover for the bones placed beneath it. That an adult and a child were interred together, their remains described as largely held in the urn but shared with the vase, adds a layer of human particularity to what might otherwise read as a dry typological description.

The site sits at the crest of a steep drop of around ten metres down to a north-west to south-east stretch of the Blackwater River, which runs approximately sixty metres away. Whether that riverine location held any significance for those who chose to bury their dead here, or whether it was simply convenient ground on a well-used plateau, is not something the archaeology can resolve.