Enclosure in Kilshane — Report the wrong picture

What is recorded here

Kilshane is not a smooth circle but a broken egg, its ditch segments still visible beneath the modern road. People dug antler into the gravel, buried bone around the whole perimeter, and set a round-bottomed vessel into the clay before leaving. Later Bronze Age hands cut into that same ditch, made pins from bone, and heated a single hearth near the place where one crouched body had been set down. The enclosure did not ask to be admired; it repeated itself across centuries, changing from marker to workshop to memorial.

Excavations in advance of the N2 Finglas-Ashbourne Road Scheme in 2004 revealed a prehistoric enclosure on a gently undulating gravel ridge along a tributary of the Ward river. This comprised an irregular ditch (Wth 1.9m-3.8m) enclosing an-egg shaped area (NW-SE 38.5m, NE-SW 27.5m). The ditch had been connected in a series of interconnecting, regular and irregular segments. Antler tines possibly used in ditch construction were found in the primary fill. One of the largest Neolithic bone assemblages from an excavated context (pers. comm. Mc Cormick) was deposited around the full circumference of the ditch. This was followed by the deposition of mid Neolithic broad-rimmed, round bottomed vessel, followed by a sealing layer of orange clay. Subsequent activity in the Early Bronze age consisted primarily of a series of deposits and features cutting into ditch fill. This produced some bone that had been worked into pins and awls, lithic material and a large pottery assemblage. In the northern area of the site there were cremation pits directly associated with burials of single bones. The only intact burial was that of a single crouched inhumation, located south of centre of the enclosure. A single hearth represents activity later in the Bronze Age (NRA). Compiled by: Geraldine Stout Date of upload: 26 August 2011

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