What is recorded here

Cakestown Glebe held a round hut with three hearths and a cup-marked stone during the Late Bronze Age, dating from roughly 1122 to 838 BC. People likely sat around the warm fires, drank from coarse pots and watched the Blackwater valley change from daylight to darkness. The road builders removed the soil decades later, but the shapes of stakes, pits and burnt clay still record that ordinary human warmth.

Located in a gently undulating landscape in the valley of the NW-SE River Blackwater, with a NW-SE section of the river c. 200m to the SW. Archaeological testing (04E0913) by J. Roynane (2005) at Testing Area 14 of Contract 4 of the M3 motorway (excavations.ie 2004:1345) identified archaeological material on the route of the N52 Kells link-road that was fully excavated (E003158) by P. Lynch (2010) in February - March 2007 as Cakestown Glebe 2 when 3325 square metres were opened. A ring-ditch, two hut-sites and a structure, together with evidence of Mesolithic habitation were recorded (excavations.ie 2007:1273). The upper levels of almost all features were cut by NE-SW post-medieval furrows. This consists of an arc of stakeholes (diam. 3.5m) S-W-N that was open to the E, three hearths and several pits or postholes. It is located c. 6m W of Structure 2. An oval hearth (dims 1.6m x 0.9m; D 0.4m) is within the arc of stakes at NW where added stakeholes are present. The hearth had an uneven base and was filled with a loose grey/black silty sand. The second hearth (dims 1.1m x 0.75m; D 0.4m) had a charcoal enriched black and red clay, and would have been located outside a putative E edge of the structure where most of the six or so postholes or pits were located but no pattern was discerned amongst them. The third hearth (dims 0.63m x 0.38m; D 0.08m) was at the NE edge of the area, but oak appears to have been the principal fuel of the larger hearths. A sample of burnt bone from the largest hearth yielded a C14 date of 993-838 cal. BC (UBA 12942). A posthole just to its W provided a C14 date of 1122-939 ca. BC (UBA 12071). The largest pit (dims 3.1m NW-SE; 1.6m NE-SW; D 0.37m) at the N edge of the area was filled with a grey/brown sandy silt and produced a small stone with hollows like cup-marks and much of the pottery of a coarse Late Bronze Age domestic variety. The rest of the pottery was derived from a single vessel that was deposited in a posthole just S of the largest hearth and this posthole also provided fragments of a clay mould for a straight-sided blade. The area was covered by a layer of charcoal enriched silty clay (dims 8.2m x 7.5m; T 0.1m) from which most of the flint, consisting mostly of flakes and blades, was recovered. (Lynch 2011, 8-12) See the attached site plan from Lynch (2011, fig. 5) and hut-site plan (fig. 6) Compiled by: Michael Moore Date of upload: 11 March 2022

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