Habitation site, Mucklon, Co. Kildare

Co. Kildare |

Settlement Sites

Habitation site, Mucklon, Co. Kildare

A field on the eastern edge of the Bog of Allen holds almost nothing to see, yet the objects that turned up there point quietly to a life once lived on the spot. Two saddle-querns, the paired grinding stones used to mill grain by hand, and a single sherd of medieval pottery were recovered near a stream at Mucklon, enough to suggest that people settled here, cooked, and ate, even if the ground itself has long since swallowed the evidence.

The first edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map, surveyed in 1838, recorded a rectangular building immediately to the west of the find-spot, estimated at roughly twenty metres in length and ten metres in width, oriented roughly north-north-west to south-south-east. No surface trace of that structure remains today. A rath, the type of circular earthwork enclosure commonly associated with early medieval farmsteads in Ireland, lies approximately two hundred and fifty metres to the south-west, hinting that the wider area was once more densely occupied than its current blankness suggests. The combination of the querns, the pottery, the vanished building on the early map, and the nearby rath amounts to a kind of archaeological circumstantial case, suggestive rather than conclusive, for a habitation site that has effectively ceased to exist above ground.

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