That detail alone gives a sense of how these kilns operated, and of how long the evidence sat quietly in the ground before anyone looked closely at it.

The site lies in a low-lying, waterlogged area just west of the River Fergus at Clareabbey, where three brick kiln clamps were uncovered during excavations in 2004, carried out ahead of the construction of the N85 Western Relief Road. A clamp kiln is one of the simplest forms of brick-firing technology, essentially a temporary structure of unfired bricks stacked around fuel, then dismantled once the firing is complete. What was found here was not a single experimental effort but what the excavators interpreted as industrial or commercial-scale production across three distinct working areas, each sitting directly on alluvium, the fine sediment deposited by river flooding, and sealed beneath layers of broken brick rubble and topsoil. The bricks themselves were irregular in size and terracotta in colour, consistent with hand-formed production rather than the more standardised output of later mechanised brickworks. Two of the three clamps had been cut through by a drainage ditch that appears on the Ordnance Survey six-inch map published in 1842, which sets a firm terminus ante quem: this brickyard was already old, and already partly obscured, before the mid-nineteenth century. How much older remains uncertain, though the riverside alluvial setting and the grass-impressed surfaces point to a simple, seasonal mode of production, the kind of operation that might leave almost no documentary trace.