Barrow (Ditch barrow), Kerloge, Co. Wexford
Co. Wexford |
Barrows
A ring-ditch on the western fringes of Wexford Harbour sounds unremarkable enough until you consider what was found inside it, or rather what was not.
The monument at Kerloge is a penannular ring-ditch, meaning a near-complete circular ditch left open at one end, the kind of enclosure typically associated with funerary or ritual activity in prehistoric Ireland. Yet despite sixty sherds of pottery recovered from its fosse, the ditch itself contained no human remains. The pottery includes pieces made in the Beaker tradition, a style characterised by cord-impressed decoration and associated broadly with the late Neolithic and early Bronze Age, roughly the third to second millennium BC. The absence of burial evidence gives the site an unresolved quality; all the ceremony, none of the body.
The ditch itself is modest in scale, measuring roughly nine metres north to south and eight and a half metres east to west, with an entrance gap of 1.7 metres at the south-west. A separate pit about seven metres to the north-east yielded fragments of a Food Vessel, another ceramic type typical of early Bronze Age funerary practice, but again with no sign of a burial accompanying it. The picture grows more complicated when you consider the broader landscape uncovered during the same excavation. Around twenty metres further to the north-east, a cluster of nine small pits produced Neolithic stone tools, and shell fragments from the same context returned a radiocarbon date of 3810 to 3650 cal. BC, placing activity at the site well over five thousand years ago. Two parallel east-west gullies running just south of the ring-ditch, each excavated to lengths of sixteen and seventeen metres respectively, may also be prehistoric, though their precise function remains unclear. A hut-site at nearby Strandfield lies roughly 150 metres to the north-east, and a further group of prehistoric pits sits about 90 metres to the south, suggesting that Kerloge was not an isolated monument but part of a much broader pattern of prehistoric settlement and activity along this stretch of the harbour's edge.
The site came to light not through planned investigation but during topsoil stripping for a development project, with monitoring beginning in 2001 and full excavation following in 2002. It sits approximately 750 metres west of the South Slob, the reclaimed wetland area that forms the southern edge of Wexford Harbour. Nothing of the monument is visible above ground today.
