Kiln, Aghamore, Co. Leitrim

Co. Leitrim |

Kilns

Kiln, Aghamore, Co. Leitrim

Road schemes have a way of turning up the past.

When advance testing began for a new stretch of the N4 near Dromod and Roosky in County Leitrim, archaeologists working along the proposed centre-line encountered something that had been quietly sitting at the edge of a raised peat bog for an unknown number of centuries. The bog, which stretches away to the east and south, had preserved the remains of what turned out to be not one but two kilns, along with five spreads of burnt mound material. Burnt mounds are a familiar if still somewhat puzzling feature of the Irish archaeological landscape, typically associated with Bronze Age activity involving the repeated heating of stones and the boiling of water, though their precise function is still debated.

The site at Aghamore was first picked up during preliminary centre-line testing in 2005, carried out under licence by O'Connor, Muniz Pérez, and Conran. Full excavation followed as part of a broader programme called Aghamore 2. The kiln that received particular attention had a stone-lined flue, a narrow channel measuring 2.8 metres in length and just 0.3 metres in width, designed to draw heat through the structure. Its base showed clear oxidisation from sustained exposure to fire, and five distinct fills were recorded within the flue, each reflecting a different degree of burning. That layering suggests the kiln was used more than once, or that its final abandonment involved a gradual accumulation of debris rather than a single event. A second kiln lay just to the north-east, indicating that this corner of the bogland was once a place of some industrial or agricultural activity, however modest in scale. The findings were published by McGowan and O'Connor in 2009.

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