What is recorded here

Eight definite furnace bottoms and eight possible ones crowded a tiny five-by-three-metre patch inside the rath’s northern annexe, proving Roestown was a busy metalworking camp rather than a quiet farming settlement. The largest pit cut through earlier furnaces and yielded a Romano-British glass bracelet, suggesting old treasure was melted or reused long after it left its first owner. A crudely cross-inscribed stone from the same waste still serves as the excavation’s icon, giving human shape to the anonymous fire and hammer-work buried beneath the green.

While the large enclosure, rath and burial ground are preserved under introduced soil in a green area all the available external area was excavated (15E0125) under the direction of S. McGlade in 2018-19 (excavations.ie 2019: 474). Features associated with metalworking cut into one of the sub-dividing internal ditches in the SW quadrant of the N annexe of the rath. Eight definite and eight possible furnace bottoms were excavated in a limited area (dims c. 5m x c. 3m) that also incorporated a number of pits and a metalled surface. The smelting furnaces were small pits (diam. c. 0.55-0.65m) that would originally have been enclosed in clay and filled with ore and charcoal. The clay would have become oxidized through the burning of the charcoal, air being introduced through nozzles or tuyéres at the bottom. The furnaces would then have been broken open to remove the cake of ore known as the bloom, which would be of a characteristic round-bottomed form with impurities like slag on its flat upper surface. The largest and last furnace was a large pit (dims 3.75m x 2.22m; D 0.65m) which cut many earlier furnaces and features. It was filled with mixtures of burnt clay, charcoal and slag, but a fragment of a first or second century Romano-British style of glass bracelet was recovered from it as well as residual flints. The glass has parallels at Lagore crannog and was probably being recycled. An elongated waste pit (max. dims 10.3m plus E-W; 2.14m N-S; max. D 0.7m) that was filled with metallurgical waste was cut into a silted E-W ditch c. 2m N of the metalworking area, and other linear features in the immediate vicinity received waste from the metalworking. Both smelting and smith-work would appear to have taken place. Amongst the artefacts from this area is a bone handle of tenth century date or later, and a palm-sized stone trial-piece that is crudely incised with a cross and has smaller crosses incised in the compartments that has become an icon of the excavation. (McGlade 2020, vol. 1, 141-143, 180-198, 338-39) True location: ITM (695968, 752950) See the attached images from McGlade (2020, vol. 1, P 201, 181, cover) _1 Metalwork in the N annexe; _1 Detail; _3 cross-inscribed stone; Compiled by: Michael Moore Date of upload; 2 May 2022

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