Habitation site, Boleyboy, Co. Mayo

Co. Mayo |

Settlement Sites

Habitation site, Boleyboy, Co. Mayo

A patch of low-lying pasture in Boleyboy, County Mayo conceals the traces of a domestic life lived somewhere between 795 and 410 BC, detectable now only through scorched stone, charcoal, and a handful of worked flint tools.

There is nothing to see from the surface today, and that is precisely what makes the site interesting: its existence came to light not through any planned excavation but through the routine archaeological monitoring of a pipeline trench, the kind of watching brief that accompanies major infrastructure work and occasionally turns up something unexpected beneath otherwise unremarkable ground.

The Lough Mask Regional Water Supply Scheme, undertaken between 2001 and 2002, involved cutting a wayleave, a strip of land cleared for the pipeline's passage, through the area. During monitoring of that work, excavators uncovered two distinct features. The larger was a deposit of burnt stone and charcoal measuring roughly 1.5 metres by 1 metre and 0.3 metres deep, which appeared to continue further to the south-east beyond the edge of the monitored strip. About 1.5 metres to the north lay a second, smaller circular deposit of charcoal, around half a metre in diameter. From these two features came fourteen chert artefacts, eleven of them from the charcoal deposit. Chert is a fine-grained rock similar to flint, and it was commonly worked during the Bronze Age to produce cutting and scraping tools. Among the recovered pieces were three end scrapers, tools typically used for processing animal hides or plant material, along with a number of tertiary flakes, the thin chips produced in the final stages of shaping a stone tool. A radiocarbon date obtained from a charcoal sample places the burnt stone deposit firmly in the Late Bronze Age, between 795 and 410 BC. The burnt stone deposit is characteristic of what archaeologists sometimes call a fulacht fia, a type of site found widely across Ireland and associated with the heating of water or the processing of food and materials, though the full character of this particular site remains unclear given that the pipeline trench could only reveal a narrow slice of what lies beneath the field.

Rated 0 out of 5

Visitor Notes

Review type for post source and places source type not found
Added by
Picture of Pete F
Pete F
IrishHistory.com is passionate about helping people discover and connect with the rich stories of their local communities.
Please use the form below to submit any photos you may have of Habitation site, Boleyboy, Co. Mayo. We're happy to take any suggested edits you may have too. Please be advised it will take us some time to get to these submissions. Thank you.
Name
Email
Message
Upload images/documents
Maximum file size: 100 MB
If you'd like to add an image or a PDF please do it here.

Advertisement