Urn burial in Glenaree

The location of an urn burial that was found by Michael Horgan in 1934 while digging potatoes on the lands of Mr John Ryan has been recently identified by James O'Brien (pers. comm. 02/11/2021) (Ó Ríordáin 1936, 34). The site was visited by Ó Ríordáin in 1934 who described the monument as follows; ‘The urn which originally rested mouth downwards on a flat stone, the surface of which was about 20 inches under the surface of the ground, and the grave hollowed out to contain the vessel was about 15 inches in diameter. The urn contained a quantity of cremated bones too fragmentary to enable one to say anything regarding the age or sex of the individual cremated. With the bones was a small bronze blade very much oxidised and the lower end of which is broken off at a rivet-hole. The present length is 81mm and the breadth 41mm. The Glenaree urn is so fragmentary and so little of it remains that, excepting the rim, which can be reconstructed with tolerable certainity, we cannot be sure of the detail of the vessel. On the basis of what remains however a suggested reconstruction is given in a drawing, for which we are indebted to Miss E. Barnes of the National Museum. The ornament on the rim is an irregular series of hatched triangles below three parallel lines encircling the vessel, all being executed by means of impressed cord. The rim bevels inwards and the bevelled surface carries also an ornamentation of short parallel lines of cord impressions running diagonally. The clay is of poor and very gritty quality, the body of it and the outer surface being dark in colour while the inner surface is brown. Below the pattern the clay is pinched out to form a raised cordon on the surface. The rim is therefore to be assigned to the cordoned type’ (Ó Ríordáin 1936, 35). Compiled by: Martin Fitzpatrick Date of upload: 5 October 2021