Metalworking site, Ballydowny, Co. Kerry
Co. Kerry |
Metalworking
Before the foundations of a housing development were laid at Ballydowny in County Kerry in 2002, excavators uncovered the faint but legible remains of what appears to have been a small ironworking operation.
It is the kind of site that leaves little on the surface and everything in the ground, its significance measured in fragments rather than standing walls.
The excavation, carried out in advance of construction, revealed an oval hearth accompanied by a linear feature at its south-western end, measuring roughly 3.2 metres long, less than a metre wide, and about 29 centimetres deep. The excavator considered this arrangement consistent with smithing, the process of working heated iron into tools or other objects. Supporting that interpretation, the fills of the hearth produced slag, the glassy waste material left over from smelting or forging, along with fragments of tuyere, the ceramic nozzle through which bellows would have forced air into a fire to raise its temperature. About four metres to the north-east, a small truncated pit, possibly a second hearth, contained further slag and charcoal. Interestingly, that same pit also yielded cereal grains and arable weeds, a detail that places this metalworking activity within a broader agricultural setting rather than an isolated industrial one. Two stake holes were recorded roughly four metres to the east of the main hearth, suggesting some kind of structure or working area nearby, though their precise function remains unclear.
What survives today is not the site itself, which lies beneath later development, but the record of what was found during those weeks of excavation. The assemblage is modest in scale yet telling in its detail, a glimpse of skilled, everyday labour in early Kerry that only came to light because groundwork happened to be scheduled there.
