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 Gorey Corporation Lands in County Wexford cut through something that had been undisturbed for thousands of years.

Workers exposing the quarry face found ceramic fragments belonging to two vessels: pieces of an encrusted urn and portions of a vase urn that had been placed upside down over a deposit of cremated human bone. That inverted position was deliberate. In Bronze Age burial practice, a vase urn set mouth-downward over cremated remains acted as a protective cover, a ceramic dome sheltering what was left of a person after the funeral pyre.

The bones beneath belonged to an adult female. Beyond that, the record is spare, as it often is with chance finds made during quarrying or construction, where context can be lost in a moment and only the objects themselves survive to be documented. The two urn types, encrusted and vase, are associated with the Irish Bronze Age, a broad period running roughly from around 2500 to 500 BC, during which cremation burial in ceramic vessels was a widespread and carefully observed practice. The encrusted urn takes its name from applied decorative pellets of clay fired onto the surface; the vase urn is a smaller, distinctly profiled form. Finding both types together at a single burial site is relatively uncommon, and their presence here suggests a deliberate, if now partially lost, funerary arrangement. The find was later examined and attributed in scholarship to Raghnall Ó Floinn, whose 2011 study informs what little we know about the assemblage.

There is no marked site to visit. The burial came to light accidentally, and the gravel extraction that revealed it also destroyed whatever spatial context might have told us more about the woman interred there, whether she was buried alone or as part of a larger cemetery, and what landscape she once inhabited above ground.

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