Metalworking site, Glenmagoo, Co. Kilkenny

Co. Kilkenny |

Metalworking

Metalworking site, Glenmagoo, Co. Kilkenny

In a corner of a reclaimed arable field in Glenmagoo, County Kilkenny, the ground holds the scattered remains of what was once a working furnace.

The evidence is modest but legible: a roughly five-metre-square spread of black, bog-iron slag, accompanied by two large burnt stones that may have formed part of the furnace bottom. Bog iron, a form of iron ore that accumulates naturally in waterlogged soils through the action of bacteria and groundwater chemistry, was one of the more accessible raw materials available to early Irish metalworkers, and sites like this one represent the unglamorous industrial end of a craft more often associated with finely wrought objects.

The site came to light not through deliberate excavation but through the practical business of farming. During land reclamation work, a slight rise in the field was ploughed out, exposing the slag deposit beneath. That small elevation, barely perceptible before it was disturbed, had preserved the material for an unknown length of time. The two burnt stones, measuring roughly 0.8 metres by 0.45 metres by 0.3 metres and 0.4 metres by 0.5 metres by 0.2 metres respectively, are substantial enough to suggest a constructed hearth rather than a casual fire, though the full character of the installation remains unclear without further investigation. What the plough revealed was, in effect, the floor of a forgotten workshop, its roof and walls long gone, its purpose reduced to a dark stain in otherwise productive agricultural land.

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