Urn burial, Pallis, Co. Wexford

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Burial Sites

Urn burial, Pallis, Co. Wexford

On the south-facing slope of Pallis Hill in County Wexford, there is a record of an urn burial that may or may not have ever existed.

The site sits in the vicinity of Pallis Lower motte, a raised earthwork of the kind thrown up by Anglo-Norman settlers in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries as a foundation for a timber tower, and it is here that a local tradition holds that an ancient funerary urn was once discovered. Urn burials typically date to the Bronze Age, when cremated remains were placed in ceramic vessels and interred in the ground, sometimes beneath small mounds or simply in the earth with little surface trace.

The tradition was noted by Kinahan in 1882, but the discovery has never been substantiated. No physical evidence appears to have been recorded, no urn described in detail, no findspot precisely fixed. What survives is essentially a piece of local memory attached to a prominent landscape feature, the kind of account that circulated in the antiquarian literature of the nineteenth century when the boundary between folklore and field observation was not always firmly drawn. That the motte itself is a real and recorded monument makes the association plausible enough to preserve, but not firm enough to treat as established fact.

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