Pit, Duntryleague, Co. Limerick

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Settlement Sites

Pit, Duntryleague, Co. Limerick

A smashed, inverted pot sitting in a charcoal-rich pit, surrounded by heat-shattered stones and unidentifiable cremated bone, is not the kind of thing that announces itself in a field in County Limerick.

There is nothing to see at this spot today, no earthwork, no marker, no trace visible on aerial imagery taken as recently as the early 2010s. What exists here is entirely a matter of record, excavated and documented and then quietly absorbed back into reclaimed agricultural pasture.

The three Bronze Age pits at Duntryleague came to light in 1986, not through any planned archaeological investigation but because a gas pipeline was being laid. The Bórd Gáis Éireann Curraleigh West-Limerick pipeline, the subject of a broader excavation report compiled by M. Gowen in 1988, cut through land that turned out to hold considerably more than anyone had anticipated. Archaeologist Claire Walsh excavated the site, recorded as TR/2/16/3, and her findings were published the following year. The three pits were spread across a 12-metre stretch of ground, all of them severely truncated, meaning they had been partially destroyed before or during the groundworks. Pit A functioned as a hearth pit, small in dimension and containing burnt animal bone. Pit B, kidney-shaped and roughly 1.3 metres long, held the fragmentary remains of a coarse, undecorated ceramic pot that had been placed upside down, along with cremated bone that could not be identified to species or individual. Pit C, just 50 centimetres away from Pit B, was irregular in shape and contained further flecks of burnt bone. The cluster lay approximately 15 metres from the enclosure ditch of a nearby ring-barrow, a circular burial monument of the type commonly associated with Bronze Age funerary practice, suggesting these pits were not incidental but part of a broader ritual landscape.

The site is not marked on the Ordnance Survey Ireland six-inch maps, and there is nothing on the surface to orient a visitor. The nearby ring-barrow does survive as a recorded feature in reclaimed pasture to the east, and that is the closest physical reference point. Anyone curious enough to seek out this general area near Duntryleague in south County Limerick should do so with low expectations of visibility and high expectations of atmosphere; the surrounding landscape carries its own quiet weight. The detailed pit plans, taken from Gowen's 1988 report, remain the clearest way to understand what was actually found here and how it was arranged in the ground.

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