Settlement cluster in Seafield (bantry By.)

Research excavations were carried out in 2001 in an area directly W of the 18th-century Bantry House (CO118-075---) at the site of a deserted Gaelic medieval village and a 17th-century English settlement. Geophysical and topographic surveys had confirmed that earthworks in the area were cultural in character and a magnetic survey located at least two house sites as well as a number of boundary features. Excavations revealed the foundations of the gable end of a mid-17th-century house. This was in turn overlain by a more substantial and better-built rectangular structure, interpreted as a timber-built English administrative building. A palisade trench, dug late in the 16th or early in the 17th century, immediately pre-dated this building. According to the excavator, this had presumably provided a stockade around the early plantation settlement (Breen 2003a, 31). Sixteenth-century cultivation ridges were also uncovered. These had cut the foundations of a 15th/16th-century Gaelic domestic structure. The excavator noted that the area appears to have been abandoned in the middle of the 17th century and all available cartographic and documentary evidence indicated that no further subsequent building or landscaping had taken place (ibid.). (Breen 2003a, 31) The above description is derived from 'The Archaeological Inventory of County Cork. Volume 5' (Dublin: Stationery Office, 2009). Date of upload: 22 December 2009