Kiln - corn-drying, Brackbaun, Co. Limerick
Co. Limerick |
Kilns
A narrow trench in a field at Brackbaun, County Limerick, turned out to hold the remnants of what was most likely a corn-drying kiln, a structure so unremarkable in appearance that it would have gone entirely unnoticed without excavation.
What makes it quietly interesting is not the kiln alone, but the company it keeps: within a short distance of the same patch of ground, archaeologists uncovered a fulacht fiadh, two smaller spreads of burnt-mound material, a Bronze Age cremation burial, and a separate area of burning. A single field, in other words, carrying layer upon layer of activity accumulated over a very long time.
The site was excavated under Ministerial Directive A035/00 ahead of road improvement works on the N8 between Cashel, Co. Tipperary, and Mitchelstown, Co. Cork, the kind of infrastructure project that routinely triggers the most productive archaeological discoveries in Ireland. The excavation area measured 60 metres by 20 metres. The fulacht fiadh, a type of ancient cooking or industrial site typically identified by a mound of burnt and shattered stone, dominated the southern part of the site. The kiln sat 20 metres to its north and was subrectangular in plan, measuring 2.74 metres by 0.9 metres, roughly the proportions of a very narrow bathtub. Its fire bowl, positioned at the northern end, was just over a metre deep. Corn-drying kilns of this general type were used to dry cereal crops before grinding or storage, particularly important in Ireland's damp climate where grain could not reliably be left to dry in open air. At the time the excavation report was compiled, the results of specialist analysis of recovered material had not yet been published.
The site is not publicly accessible in any formal sense and lies along a road corridor that has since been developed. There is nothing to see at ground level. Its interest is archival rather than visual, the kind of place whose significance exists in the excavation records and whatever the specialist analysis eventually reveals about the crops, the chronology, and the relationship between the kiln and the older prehistoric features clustered so closely around it.