Habitation site, Rathmore, Co. Wicklow

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Settlement Sites

Habitation site, Rathmore, Co. Wicklow

A road scheme is not the most obvious way to uncover the distant past, but that is precisely what happened in the townland of Rathmore, County Wicklow, when topsoil-stripping for the N11 Newtownmountkennedy to Ballynabarny road improvement brought an unexpected archaeological deposit to light.

What made the site quietly compelling was not a single dramatic find but the layering of time itself: material from two quite separate periods, prehistoric and medieval, sitting within a narrow strip of ground, each leaving just enough trace to raise questions that the excavation could only partially answer.

Work at the site, designated Monitoring Site 20, began in June 2002 and ran for four weeks. Archaeologists opened an area 45 metres by 10 metres and identified a large, dark brown, silty clay deposit, designated F1, in the southern half of the trench. Within it they recovered sherds of pottery tentatively dated to the Bronze Age, along with a leaf-shaped arrowhead, a projectile form associated with Neolithic and early Bronze Age use in Ireland. A secondary, charcoal-rich layer overlay part of this deposit. Roughly 8 metres to the north, a curvilinear ditch, some 22 metres long and cut to an average depth of 0.65 metres, ran roughly north to south through the site. Its upper fill contained sherds of medieval pottery, suggesting the feature was open, or at least accumulating material, well into the medieval period, centuries after whatever activity had produced the prehistoric layers to the south. The lower fills of the ditch were likely redeposited subsoil, the kind of material that settles naturally into an open cut over time.

What the site represents in terms of actual occupation remains open. The scatter of Bronze Age pottery and the arrowhead point to human activity in the area perhaps three or four thousand years ago, while the ditch and its medieval fills suggest the landscape was being managed or enclosed at a much later date. Neither phase left enough behind to reconstruct a building, a boundary, or a routine, only a suggestion that people kept returning to this particular patch of Wicklow ground across a very long span of time.

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