What is recorded here

In the eleventh century, a fenced circle twenty-three metres wide on Inis Cealtra became a workshop where bronze scraps and ornamental waste accumulated beside a central hearth. The enclosure overlaid older burials and a wooden shrine, suggesting craftsmen worked directly above ancestral remains rather than avoiding them. Light huts or bothies clustered inside the fence, creating a temporary settlement where metalwork and memory occupied the same small space.

Situated c. 12m N of the Saint’s Graveyard (CL029-009030-) on Inis Cealtra. An almost circular fenced enclosure (diam. c. 23m) with evidence of bronze-working was excavated in the 1970s and dated to the 11th century AD (de Paor 2013, 39, 57). Stone ‘motif pieces’ were found as well as bronze waste and scraps of bronze with ornament in the ‘Irish Ringerike’ style. A ‘stain’ of a possible rectangular structure was found in the interior and there were traces of one or more extremely light huts or bothies, in one case with a hearth in the centre. The enclosure overlay earlier burials associated with a graveyard or enclosure (CL029-009135-) around a wooden shrine (CL029-009134-). A pit within the enclosure yielded radiocarbon dates of Cal AD 775-962 (UBA-27539) (Seaver and O'Sullivan 2015, 12-13, 33). Revised by: Mary Tunney Date of revision: 19 July 2016

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