Burnt spread, Leggatinty, Co. Roscommon

Co. Roscommon |

Ritual/Ceremonial

Burnt spread, Leggatinty, Co. Roscommon

In boggy ground at Leggatinty, beneath what was once commercial forestry in County Roscommon, a patch of scorched earth and shattered stone has been lying quietly for the best part of three thousand years.

The spread, roughly twelve metres north to south and nearly seven metres wide, is not the remnant of a house or a hearth in any obvious sense. There is no associated trough or pit of the kind usually found alongside a fulacht fiadh, the familiar Bronze Age cooking site where water was heated by dropping fire-cracked stones into a water-filled trough. What survives instead is an irregular stain in the ground: charcoal-rich soil mixed with heat-shattered sandstone, the physical memory of sustained burning whose original purpose is no longer clear.

The site came to light during test excavations carried out as part of the N5 Ballaghaderreen to Scramoge road improvement project, which created a narrow window of investigation across the landscape. Radiocarbon dating of willow charcoal recovered from the spread returned a calibrated date of 1264 to 1055 BC, placing the activity firmly in the Middle to Late Bronze Age. The charred wood remains included alder, hazel, oak, willow, and pomaceous fruitwood, a category that covers apple, pear, and related species, suggesting a varied woodland environment in the vicinity. A later field drain, running north to south, had cut across the western edge of the spread at some point, trimming its margins without destroying the core. Crucially, the burnt material continues eastward beyond the boundary of the road-take by an estimated ten metres or more, meaning the full extent of the deposit was never fully examined. That unexcavated portion remains in the ground.

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Pete F
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