What is recorded here

Twenty-five people slept beneath a thin esker ridge while a road cutter tore through their quiet chamber in 1987. They lay stretched and bare, without gifts or markers, beside a hearth and a shallow ditch that may have enclosed them. The dead belonged to no single century, perhaps Iron Age, perhaps medieval, leaving behind a long forgotten neighbourhood rather than a dated tomb.

In a partially quarried away esker, immediately N and downslope from a standing stone (KD032-012001-). In 1987, burials were discovered when an access road was being created. A linear area (L c. 150m E-W; min. Wth c. 10m at W; max. Wth c. 38m at E) had been disturbed and was subsequently archaeologically excavated (Keeley 1987. Excavation Licence No. E000420). Nine extended inhumation burials in simple shallow graves, without grave goods, together with the remains of a further 16 disturbed burials were uncovered, as well as pottery and iron objects. Portion of a possible enclosing ditch (D 0.8m; Wth 3m) and a hearth were also found. In the absence of definitive dating evidence and pending the results of Carbon 14 analysis of bone, the excavator could only conclude that the site probably dated to any time from the Iron Age (c. 500 BC- AD 400) through to medieval times (5th to16th-century AD). (Keeley 1991a, 161-7) Compiled by: Gearóid Conroy Date of upload: 15 October 2013 This monument is subject to a preservation order made under the National Monuments Acts 1930 to 2014 (PO no. 7/1973).

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