Prehistoric site - lithic scatter, Robswalls, Co. Dublin

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Prehistoric site – lithic scatter, Robswalls, Co. Dublin

A low rise of ground near Robswalls in north County Dublin holds the traces of several thousand years of human activity, none of it visible to the naked eye and almost all of it locked away in museum storage.

The site on Paddy's Hill yielded no walls, no monuments, no earthworks to speak of, and yet what came out of the soil amounted to one of the more substantial prehistoric lithic assemblages recorded in the region.

Systematic field collecting and excavation in the early 1980s produced 2,809 classified flint artefacts along with a stone axe. A lithic scatter, as the site type is formally known, refers to a concentration of worked stone left behind by prehistoric people manufacturing or using tools; the debris includes the waste flakes knocked off during knapping as well as the finished objects themselves. At Paddy's Hill, researchers identified cores, the nodules of flint from which blades were struck; scrapers used for working hide or wood; arrowheads; and blades, some of which would have functioned as cutting tools. The material was catalogued and analysed by Keeley and colleagues, with published reports appearing between 1989 and 1994. Flanagan's earlier work in 1984 established that the most frequently occurring finds were Neolithic in date, with the assemblage ranging through into the Early Bronze Age. The only structural evidence recovered was two pits, whose contents were radiocarbon dated to around 4120 and 4040 calibrated years BC, placing human activity at this spot well over six thousand years ago, in the earlier Neolithic period when farming communities were beginning to reshape the Irish landscape.

There is nothing to see at Paddy's Hill today in the conventional sense. The finds are not displayed in situ, and the site carries no interpretive signage or formal visitor infrastructure. For anyone curious enough to make the trip to Robswalls, the interest lies in the landscape itself, a coastal fringe of north Dublin that retains a quiet, open quality, and in the knowledge that the ground underfoot was once a place where people sat and worked flint into tools across generations. The published research by Keeley, Keeling, and Flanagan remains the primary means of engaging with what was found here.

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Robswalls, Co. Dublin
53.43835123,-6.1316048

Ref: DU00512

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