Habitation site, Ward Upper, Co. Dublin
Co. Dublin |
Settlement Sites
A single pit less than two metres across, dug into the ground of north County Dublin sometime in the Late Bronze Age, and filled with the broken pieces of at least 280 ceramic vessels: that is the quiet centre of what was uncovered at Ward Upper, a site that might easily have vanished entirely beneath a new road without anyone noticing.
The discovery came in 2004, during excavations carried out ahead of the N2 Finglas-Ashbourne Road Scheme. Archaeologists working under reference 03E1358 uncovered what the records describe as a random grouping of features: a small burnt pit, a linear feature, and a small pit that may also have served as a cremation deposit. The most significant of these was a pit measuring 1.65 metres in diameter and 0.65 metres deep, which produced 280 pieces of prehistoric pottery dating to the Late Bronze Age, a period running roughly from around 1200 to 600 BC when communities across Ireland were producing distinctive coarse-ware ceramics, often associated with domestic use, food storage, or ritual activity. Whether the concentration of pottery here reflects the debris of everyday settlement, a deliberate deposit, or something connected to burial practice is not entirely clear from the evidence, and that ambiguity is itself part of what makes the site interesting. The findings were compiled by archaeologist Geraldine Stout and uploaded to the record in August 2011.
The site lies along the N2 corridor between Finglas and Ashbourne, in the townland of Ward Upper. Because the excavation was a road-scheme intervention, the features were recorded and the ground was subsequently developed; there is nothing visible at the surface today. The value of places like this is not in what can be seen but in what they confirm: that the landscape of north Dublin was occupied and active in the Bronze Age, and that the ordinary routines of people living here, cooking, storing, perhaps mourning their dead, have left faint but recoverable traces just below the tarmac.