What is recorded here

Killegland holds a rare chain of six ring-ditches, one large and five smaller, joined edge to edge on a gentle slope above the church. They have no visible houses, fires or burials, yet their shape suggests a place set apart for ceremony, memory or exclusion. The chain still touches the living town, waiting for people to imagine what it kept.

Located towards the top a gentle NW-facing slope c. 125m W of Killegland church (ME045-004----). Archaeological testing (05E1321) by S. Halliday (2007) in advance of a housing development identified numerous archaeological features (excavations.ie 2006:1496) some of which were investigated under the original licence (excavations.ie 2006:1496), but others, numbered Sites I and III, were resolved (excavations.ie 2006:1499) later by J. Kavanagh (2007) under a different licence (06E0871). Site III consists of a bivallate ring-ditch (ME045-075----), with a line of five smaller ring-ditches touching edge to edge and extending S from this large feature. These structures might be hut-sites or barrows, and all of them are truncated slightly on the W side by a later N-S ditch that turns W at its N end as it encounters the outer ditch of the large ring-ditch. The E edges of the structures also tend to disappear through plough action. Although no burials are associated directly with these features neither are there any hearths or post-holes, The fourth feature (int. dims 5.1m N-S; c. 3.5m E-W) has a U-shaped ditch (Wth 0.56m; D 0.16m) and an entrance may have been at the SE, although the ditch peters out on the E side. There were three shallow pits filled with silty clay in the interior but no artefacts were recovered. See the attached plan from Kavanagh (2007, fig. 5) Compiled by: Michael Moore Date of upload: 22 December 2021

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