What is recorded here

Four pits in northern Tralee hold Bronze Age slag and reused grinding stones, proving that human hands shaped the Monavalley soil long before factory wheels turned above it. The largest pit stretches three metres across, deep enough to swallow a child standing upright. Modern monitoring uncovered what generations of foot traffic had forgotten: a place where people lived, worked and discarded before it became land for sale.

'Monitoring of all ground disturbance aspects of a factory site in the Monavalley Industrial Estate, in the northern part of Tralee town, was undertaken to comply with a planning condition. An area of archaeological stratigraphy was noted during topsoil-stripping and was subsequently excavated. Four pits were excavated. One of the pits, measuring 1.6m north-south by 0.9m and 0.98m deep, was stone-lined on the south-east side. A saddle quern and a rubbing stone had been reused to line the pit. Iron slag was recovered from the upper fill. A second large pit was found 1m to the south-west; it measured 3.1m north-south by 2.7m and 0.8m deep. Two small pits were found to the south and east. They measured 0.8m north-south by 0.76m by 0.2m deep and 0.75m north-south by 0.7m by 0.15m deep. The material recovered from one of the large pits would suggest that they are prehistoric in date.' (Kiely 2000, 116-7) Description from ‘The Prehistoric Settlement of the Lee Valley, Tralee, Co. Kerry; A Landscape Perspective’ by Michael Connolly. PhD Thesis UCC 2008. Pit no. C29 - radiocarbon dated to Middle Bronze Age 3485±59 BP (Kiely and Dunne 2005, 45).

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