Pit, Inis Gluaire, Co. Mayo

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Settlement Sites

Pit, Inis Gluaire, Co. Mayo

On the south-eastern shore of Inishglora, a small island off the north Mayo coast, the sea is slowly eating away at the land.

As the coastal scarp erodes and the vertical edge crumbles, the archaeology held inside it is being exposed in cross-section, layer by layer, like the pages of a book being torn out one by one. It is in this eroding face that a small, possibly ancient pit has come to light, along with something more unsettling: displaced human bones, lying on the ground surface at the base of the section, uncovered and scattered by the ongoing collapse.

The pit itself is modest in scale, roughly squarish in cross-section, between 0.4 and 0.8 metres wide and around 0.35 to 0.4 metres deep. It is filled with dark brown, charcoal-flecked sandy soil, and two large flat stones sit horizontally within the upper eastern side of the fill, one resting above the other. The pit sits approximately mid-way along a midden layer, a midden being a deposit of accumulated domestic or settlement refuse, typically including shell, bone, and ash, which can represent centuries of occupation. At the point where the pit appears, the midden is notably thin and insubstantial, and while the pit clearly cuts down into the clean sand beneath it, the precise relationship between the pit and the midden remains uncertain. Whether the pit predates the midden, interrupts it, or belongs to a different phase of activity on the island altogether has not been resolved. The human bones noted in August 2016 add a further complication, raising questions about burial activity in the vicinity, though their exact origin within the stratigraphy is unclear given their displaced state.

Inishglora carries a long history of early Christian activity, and the island's eroding shoreline has been yielding fragments of that past incrementally. This particular feature is a reminder of how much can remain suspended in a coastal bank for an indeterminate stretch of time, readable only once the sea decides to open it up.

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