Metalworking site, Rossan, Co. Meath

During preliminary centre-line testing, archaeologist Ian Russell flagged an area of sub-surface features that warranted closer attention, and the subsequent excavation opened a small window onto industrial activity stretching back more than two thousand years.

The dig exposed seventeen pits cut into the subsoil. Three of these, concentrated at the southern edge of the site, had oxidised bases and were filled with charcoal and large slag inclusions, the physical residue of metalworking. One was identified as a bowl furnace, a simple pit furnace in which iron ore is smelted using a forced air supply, measuring roughly 0.78 by 0.76 metres and 0.4 metres deep. Radiocarbon dating placed its use somewhere between 370 and 50 BC, firmly within the Irish Iron Age. The other two were interpreted as bloom-smithing hearths, where the raw spongy mass of iron produced in smelting, known as a bloom, would have been hammered and refined. The larger of these hearths, more than three metres across, may originally have been dug as a charcoal production pit, and its primary fill returned a date of around 820 to 780 BC, pushing activity at the site back into the Late Bronze Age. About sixty metres to the north-north-west, a second cluster of around ten pits was also recorded. These were filled with silty sands and clays containing occasional charcoal or oxidised clay, but no metalworking debris and no artefacts were recovered from them, leaving their precise function uncertain. A single unworked flint found in one of the hearths was the only other object the ground gave up.