Two fragments of human skull, resting at the base of a boundary ditch alongside twenty-three disarticulated cattle vertebrae and a single iron blade, are not what most people picture when they think of a road interchange. Yet that is precisely what excavators found in the Kildare countryside during the monitoring of a new road scheme between Celbridge and Leixlip in 2001. The site, designated Site 16 during the project, turned out to be a layered record of activity that resists any single tidy explanation.

The work, carried out under licence between April and December 2001, covered roughly four kilometres of gently undulating land through a mixture of arable fields, pasture, and woodland. The southern stretch of the scheme passes through a landscape still shaped by eighteenth-century design, with avenues and tree-lined field boundaries arranged around Castletown, an early eighteenth-century house at Celbridge. Site 16 itself was read in three phases. The earliest, Phase 1, comprised a hearth, several pits, and a scattering of post-holes concentrated in the north-western part of the site. The post-holes formed no recognisable building plan, but their proximity to the hearth, combined with pits containing both burnt and unburnt bone, points to some form of domestic occupation. A single sherd of medieval pottery from one of the pits, pit C23, gives a terminus post quem, meaning the earliest possible date the deposit could have formed, placing activity here no earlier than the medieval period. The large boundary ditch of Phase 2, running northward across the entire site with a C-shaped profile at its southern end and a rounded V-shape at its northern, may be roughly contemporary with Phase 1; it did not cut through any of the earlier features. Its fills produced the skull fragments, the disarticulated cattle bones, and the iron blade, suggesting that people were disposing of both animal remains and, in a more puzzling fashion, parts of at least one person into an open ditch. Phase 3 left nine east-to-west plough furrows crossing the site, some of them cutting through the earlier ditch. Post-medieval pottery, glass, clay pipe fragments, a nail, and a silver button came from the upper furrow fills and topsoil, traces of the agricultural routine that eventually buried everything beneath it.