What is recorded here

Hot stones split and rained into clay four thousand years before the farm appeared, marking a kitchen where people turned heat into food or bathwater. The oval trough still holds its black plastic lining, while broken stone and alder charcoal fill the mound above it. Later furrows cut the top, and a smaller spread beside the main feature dates near the start of the Christian era. Castlekeeran is not a distant myth; it is a working place buried beneath an ordinary field.

Located at the base of a small N-facing slope in a gently undulating landscape and c. 30m N of a continuing post-medieval farmstead. Archaeological testing (04E1055) by D. Bayley (2005) at Testing Area 4 of Contract 5 of the M3 identified a spread of broken and burnt stone (excavations.ie 2004:1223) that was fully excavated (E003176) by S. Reilly in January 2007 (excavations.ie 2007:1278) as Castlekeeran 3. It consisted of a large spread (dims 20m N-S; 10m E-W; T 0.2m) of soft black clayey silt mixed with heat-shattered stones that had charcoal inclusions. It overlay an oval trough (dims 2.3m x 1.5m; D 0.35m) that had remnants of a clay lining evident as a black plastic clay along its sides. It was filled with a friable dark brown clay with small stones. A sample of alder charcoal from the mound produced a C14 date of 2030-1774 cal. BC (Beta 247178). The top of the mound was cut by NNE-SSW furrows. A detached spread (dims 4m E-W; 3m N-S) was immediately to the W and a sample of alder charcoal produced a C14 date of 41 cal. BC – 129 cal. AD (Beta 247179). Three pits (dims 1m x 0.8m; D 0.14m to 1.9m x 1.2m; D 0.2m) filled with clayey silts with stones could be contemporary but there were also two larger modern pits. The walls of a post-medieval building were c. 5m to the NE. (Reilly and Ginn 2008) Compiled by: Michael Moore Date of upload: 4 March 2022

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