Indicated — Lough Gara

In 1952 drainage works on the Boyle River lowered the water level of the Lough Gara lakes, and artefacts recovered from crannogs were reported to the National Museum of Ireland. That autumn, Dr. J. Raftery and Miss E. Prendergast of the Museum staff collected artefacts from about 150 crannogs which they noted in the lakes and on the Boyle River. Dr. Raftery permitted Mr. R. E. Cross, the project engineer, to publish a map (1953) based on his own preliminary survey with numbered crannogs, a copy of which is now held in the Department of Archaeology at University College Dublin. During 1953 further drainage work on the river resulted in another reduction of the water level, which revealed numerous cairns on both sides of the river below the outlet from Upper Lough Gara. Dr. Raftery was at that time engaged in excavating crannogs at Rathtinaun (SL047-021----) and Tivannagh (RO005-012003-), but undertook in his free time to supervise an instrument survey of these additional features, which were not expected to survive and which were not properly understood. This mapped survey, from which no artefacts were recovered, is known as the Forsyth survey after one the surveyors, whose name appears on one of the finished maps. It did not necessarily include a revisit of Raftery’s 1952 preliminary survey, and where it did a natural concordance does not always occur. The Forsyth survey is retained in the National Museum of Ireland. This feature (Raftery No. 22) is a circular grass and scrub-covered cairn (diam. 36m E-W; 34m N-S; H 2.7m) with a central cairn (dims 13m x 5m). On the N (river) side there are timbers exposed at the base of the mound, and there is the remains of a causeway (L c. 26m) at S, visible as a line of stones. A quernstone has been found, and four radiocarbon samples produced dates of c. 800-1000 AD (Fredengren 2002, App. 1, 28-9, BOYL 38). It is recorded on the Forsyth survey as a large cairn (diam. c. 30m) with a recorded altitude of 222.42 feet above the datum of Poolbeg Lighthouse, and is depicted as having a causeway (L c. 30m) extending S towards the shore. It is now on the S bank of the Boyle River above Lough Gara Lower (Bing 2013), but prior to the drainage it was in a small bay. Compiled by: Michael Moore Date of revised upload: 10 November 2017