What is recorded here

Excavation: A long forgotten kitchen on a Meath hillside. Under the road verge, charcoal pits and burnt stones still hold the heat of meals eaten centuries before the tower house rose. People lived there, ate there, and disappeared into the soil. The road was realigned and the kitchen emerged, not as monument but as evidence. What looks like empty ground is often a dining room waiting to be remembered.

Situated at the crest of the S-facing slope of a broad hill, c. 240m NW of the tower house (ME049-002----) and c. 220m N of the medieval excavated features (ME049-035----). Archaeological testing (06E1231) by A. Collins (2008, 18) in advance of the realignment of a N-S section of the R158 road identified archaeological deposits extending over a narrow strip (dims 100m N-S; 17m E-W) on the E side of the existing road that were subsequently excavated (07E0296) as Site 10 by E. Larsson (excavations.ie 2007:1313). Lithics of a Neolithic character and some pits of later prehistoric date are present, while two cereal-drying kilns were also recorded in this era. Two groups of burials, dating to the early medieval and the post-medieval periods were excavated as well as a N-W ditch that is probably an earlier iteration of the existing road bank and ditch. (Larsson 2009) An isolated oval, flat-bottomed pit (dims 1.03m x 0.6m; max. D 0.36m) had four fills of sandy/silty clays with some charcoal flecks and animal bones. A secondary fill contained three small glass beads, and a sample from the same layer produced a C14 date of 360-90 cal. BC. A pit (dims 0.8m x 0.58m; D 0.3m: ) c. 30m to the N contained fills with burnt stone and a sample returned a determination of 50 cal. BC to 80 cal. AD. The adjacent pit (diam. 1.85m; max. D 0.73m) had six fills, largely of clayey silts with and without animal bones, but the uppermost layer had dense concentrations of charcoal and burnt stones. (Larsson 2009, 20-1) Compiled by: Michael Moore Date of upload: 29 June 2021

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