What is recorded here

Archaic hands cut a sixteen-metre arc through the Roestown soil, linking older ditches into a seventh enclosure before later work severed its northern edge. Charred barley and oak charcoal still rest inside that shallow curve, hinting at meals eaten beside the marker rather than violence recorded within it. The ditch may have surrounded two human burials and several gullies, yet no object has survived to confirm whether the arc excluded the dead or honored them.

In Area A an arcing ditch (L 16m; Wth 0.75m; D 0.55m) may have linked the fosses of Enclosures 2 and 6 during Phase 2, curving out further E than Enclosure 6 and constituting Enclosure 7. The surviving section of fosse was cut at N by the N ditch of Enclosure 3 during Phase 2. The single fill of the ditch had inclusions of charred barley grain as well as hazel and oak charcoal. The curving ditch enclosed a number of gullies and two human burials, but none of these features could be stratigraphically related to the curving ditch from which no artefacts were recovered. (O’Hara 2009, 17; 2009a) True location: ITM (695766, 753931) See the attached plans from O'Hara (2009, figs 9, 44) _2 Site plan; _3 Phase 1 Compiled by: Michael Moore Date of upload: 25 April, 2022 O’Hara, R. 2009 M3 Clonee - North of Kells, Contract 2 Dunshaughlin - Navan. Final Report on the Archaeological Excavation of Roestown 2, Co. Meath. Licence: E003055. Unpublished report, Archaeological Consultancy Services O’Hara, R. 2009a Early Medieval Settlement at Roestown 2. In Deevy, M. and Donald Murphy 2009 Places Along the Way, 57-82. NRA Scheme Monographs: 5.

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