Pit, Ballygullen, Co. Wexford

Co. Wexford |

Settlement Sites

Pit, Ballygullen, Co. Wexford

Two shallow pits in a field on a gentle south-facing slope in County Wexford do not, at first glance, suggest much.

But the soil filling them tells a different story: heat-affected clay, charcoal flecking, oxidised bases, layers of reddish and yellowish sand that speak of sustained burning at some point in the past. Whatever happened here, it happened more than once, in two separate features roughly twelve metres apart, and then the landscape simply moved on around them.

The pits came to light during archaeological testing carried out by T. Coughlin and Y. Whitty ahead of construction on the M11 Gorey to Enniscorthy road. The larger of the two measured approximately 1.5 metres by 0.7 metres, with a maximum depth of just under 40 centimetres; its base had been oxidised, meaning the heat reached the very bottom of the cut. The smaller, oval pit to the east was shallower, barely 12 centimetres deep, and had been partly clipped by a later agricultural furrow, which is itself a small reminder of how many layers of human activity can accumulate in ordinary farmland. No artefacts were recovered from either feature, which makes dating and interpretation difficult. Pits with this kind of heat-affected fill are often associated with fulachta fiadh, a type of prehistoric cooking or industrial site typically identified by burnt mounds of shattered stone, though no such mound was recorded here. Without finds or dating samples, the connection remains speculative. Because neither pit fell within the direct footprint of the road works, both were preserved in situ rather than excavated fully, left undisturbed beneath the slope where they were found.

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