Pottery Kiln, Moneymore, Co. Louth

Co. Louth |

Kilns

Pottery Kiln, Moneymore, Co. Louth

Road works are rarely the setting for archaeological discovery, but at Moneymore in County Louth, the routine business of re-surfacing a road briefly exposed something far older beneath the tarmac.

During archaeological monitoring of the works, carried out under Excavation Licence No. E0431, the fragmentary remains of a pottery kiln came to light, along with sherds of ceramic material and what appears to be kiln waste, the kind of misfired or discarded pieces that accumulate around a working production site.

The find was recorded by Campbell in 1987, placing its documentation in a period when developer-led monitoring was becoming more formalised in Irish archaeology. Pottery kilns are not especially common surface finds in Ireland, partly because they tend to survive only in fragmentary form and partly because they are easily missed without close observation. A kiln of this kind would have been used to fire ceramic vessels at high temperature, typically in a simple updraught structure built from clay or stone. The associated waste material suggests this was not merely a place where pottery was used, but where it was actually manufactured, making the site a rare trace of local craft production in the Louth landscape. The precise date of the kiln is not recorded in what survives of the documentation, but the character of the find points to a working site of some duration rather than a single episode of activity.

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