Pit, Singland, Co. Limerick

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Settlement Sites

Pit, Singland, Co. Limerick

Beneath the tarmac and traffic of a Limerick road junction lies something that nobody can quite explain.

During groundworks for the Parkway Roundabout to Plassey Road Junction Realignment, on what had been flat pastureland roughly 500 metres west of the Groody River, a small cluster of pits came to light, filled with charcoal and bearing the reddened bases that come from fire burned directly inside them. One of those pits contained a single sherd of pottery, tentatively identified as Neolithic, meaning it may date back four or five thousand years. The pits are gone now, buried again under the road surface, but the questions they raised have not been so easily covered over.

The site was first identified during topsoil stripping carried out under licence No. 00E0653, as recorded by O'Rahilly in 2002. A subsequent excavation under licence No. 01E0946, reported by Cummins in 2001 and again in 2003, examined a cutting of approximately 15 metres east to west by 10 metres north to south. Three pits were investigated in some detail. Two sat close to the centre of the road corridor. The first was a small oval feature, less than 70 centimetres at its longest, with a heat-reddened base indicating burning in place rather than the disposal of ash from elsewhere. Cutting into it was a later, smaller circular pit containing charcoal and that solitary prehistoric pottery fragment. A third pit, roughly a metre across, lay about five metres to the north-west, its eastern side similarly fire-reddened. No other evidence of habitation turned up in the excavation area, which made a straightforward domestic interpretation difficult to sustain. The excavator raised the possibility of ritual activity, perhaps burial or a votive deposit, though no cremated bone was found. Post-medieval field boundaries and buildings visible on both the 1840 Ordnance Survey six-inch map and the 1897 twenty-five-inch edition complicated matters further, as did a field boundary ditch, tree root disturbance, and old cultivation furrows running across the site.

There is nothing to see at Singland today. The excavation area is sealed beneath a busy junction on the southern approach to Limerick city, and the pits themselves were recorded and then lost to infrastructure. The value of the site lies not in any visible remains but in what the archive holds: a set of small, fire-scarred features of uncertain purpose, touched once by Neolithic people and then left alone for millennia until a road scheme briefly brought them back into the light.

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