Urn burial, Cush, Co. Limerick
Co. Limerick |
Burial Sites
Under a large irregular boulder at Cush, supported on smaller stones and positioned north-east of a ringfort entrance, excavators in the 1930s found something both ordinary and quietly puzzling: the upturned rim of a ceramic urn, its mouth pressed into the earth, the rest of the vessel gone.
Whatever had once contained the cremated remains of a person had been partially removed at some unknown point, leaving only this fragment as evidence that a burial had taken place at all.
The site at Cush was excavated between 1934 and 1935 by Seán P. Ó Ríordáin, whose findings were published in 1940. The burial, recorded as Burial IV, was one of four urn and cist burials, a cist being a small stone-lined grave, found in the western half of a bivallate ringfort, meaning a ringfort enclosed by two concentric earthen banks rather than one. The presence of prehistoric burials within or adjacent to a ringfort, which is itself an early medieval type of enclosed settlement, points to a landscape used and reused across many centuries. What makes Burial IV particularly interesting is Ó Ríordáin's own interpretation: he suggested that this burial, and the one found near it, represented what he called an extreme degeneration of the dolmen form of grave, the dolmen being the familiar megalithic tomb type in which a large capstone is raised on uprights. Here, the single sheltering boulder over the urn appears to echo that much older tradition in a reduced and vestigial form, the idea of protection through stone still present, but the formal architecture largely abandoned.
Cush is a townland in County Limerick, and the ringfort complex recorded here forms part of a broader archaeological landscape in the area. The site is not a managed visitor attraction, and access would require consulting current landowner permissions and relevant Ordnance Survey or Archaeological Survey of Ireland mapping to locate it precisely. Anyone with an interest in the excavation itself will find Ó Ríordáin's 1940 publication the most detailed guide to what was found and where, including the plans and photographs that accompanied the original report.