What is recorded here

Heat is the first fact. A man may have thrown stone into that hollow, waited for the crackle, and poured water across the mound until steam climbed the grass. The road took the edge, the drain cut the south, and the field furrows crossed the marks, yet the trough still holds its charcoal clay. What the stone gave up in breaking, the water returned as vapour, and the hollow kept the shape of that exchange long after the hands left it.

Situated in a hollow on a gently undulating landscape. Archaeological testing (03E1237) by D. Boner of Area 31 in advance of the N2 bypass of Ashbourne identified a trough and burnt mound material (Boner and Hackett 2003) which was excavated by C. Murray under the same licence (excavations.ie 2004:1247) in the confined area between a NE-SW field drain and bank at SE and the N-S boundary of the land-take at W. It consists of a subcircular trough (dims 1.15m NE-SW; 0.8m NW-SE; D 0.17m) which was filled with a charcoal-rich clay that contained burnt and broken stone. Just 2.6m to the SW was a mound (dims 2.1m N-S; 1.6m E-W; max. D 0.26m) of broken and burnt stone in a shallow cut that was truncated by a field drain at S but extended outside the road-take to the W. Detached spreads of burnt mound material lay 2.1m to the NE (dims 0.65m x 0.26m) and 3m NW (0.65m x 0.52m) of the trough, and post-medieval furrows run NW-SE through the earlier features. No artefacts were recovered, and no radiocarbon dates are available. (Murray 2008) Compiled by: Michael Moore Date of upload: 21 December 2021

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