Urn burial, Gorey Corporation Lands, Co. Wexford

Co. Wexford |

Burial Sites

Urn burial, Gorey Corporation Lands, Co. Wexford

In 1989, a gravel quarry on the Corporation Lands outside Gorey exposed something that had been undisturbed for perhaps three thousand years: fragments of two prehistoric urns, one of them a vase urn that had been placed upside-down over a deposit of cremated human bone.

The inversion was deliberate, a Bronze Age funerary practice in which the urn effectively served as a cover or container for the cremated remains, protecting them within the earth. The bones, when examined, were identified as belonging to an adult female.

Alongside the inverted vase urn, fragments of a second, encrusted urn were also recovered from the quarry face. Both vessels belonged to a burial tradition common across Bronze Age Ireland, in which the dead were cremated and their remains interred in ceramic vessels, often without accompanying grave goods or formal monument. The fact that these were found eroding from a gravel quarry face is a reminder of how many such burials have come to light by chance, exposed by agricultural or industrial work rather than by any planned excavation. The site is recorded under the reference WX007-055----.

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