Kiln - corn-drying, Lurgan, Co. Roscommon

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Kilns

Kiln – corn-drying, Lurgan, Co. Roscommon

Four corn-drying kilns, arranged around a medieval ringfort in County Roscommon, spent centuries quietly buried beneath farmland before a road scheme brought them to light.

What makes this cluster at Lurgan unusual is not simply their number but the story embedded in their fill layers: each kiln appears to have ended its working life not through gradual disuse but through a final firing that destroyed its contents, after which the structures collapsed inward on themselves. The sequence is the same across all four, which suggests something systematic rather than accidental, though whether that points to deliberate clearance, a single catastrophic event, or simply the ordinary rhythm of abandonment is not yet resolved.

The kilns, designated A through D, were uncovered during archaeological excavation associated with the N5 Ballaghaderreen to Scramoge road project. A corn-drying kiln, in its medieval Irish form, was typically a keyhole-shaped or oval pit with a long flue leading to a drying chamber, designed to dry harvested grain using controlled heat before milling or storage. Three of the kilns, A, B, and C, were found clustered roughly 62 metres to the west-southwest of the associated ringfort, while Kiln D lay about 22 metres to its northeast. All four are of broadly medieval design, though none could be precisely dated at the time of excavation, and radiocarbon analysis of bulk samples was planned to establish when each kiln last fired and what crop was being processed. The kilns vary in construction: Kiln A is a simple unlined oval roughly 3.28 metres long, while Kiln B is a substantial stone-lined structure nearly 5.4 metres in length, its chamber walls built from limestone blocks bonded with clay and its collapsed superstructure still recognisable as the fallen remains of a domed cupola. Kiln B also contained an unexpected find within its fill: an early medieval glass bead, two iron objects, and a scattering of disarticulated human remains connected to a burial identified within the kiln's footprint. Kiln C yielded a single polished stone. Both Kilns B and C extend beyond the excavated area, their unexcavated southern portions left in situ beneath the ground.

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