Structure, Scart, Co. Kilkenny
Co. Kilkenny |
Utility Structures
A plateau in County Kilkenny with long views east towards Tory Hill turned out, when road builders arrived in 2006, to conceal more than two thousand years of human activity that nobody had previously suspected was there.
The excavation at Scart, carried out ahead of the N9/N10 Kilcullen to Waterford road scheme, uncovered a site used and reused from the Early Neolithic period through to the Late Bronze Age, a span running from roughly 4000 BC to somewhere around 800 BC.
The earliest traces were those of a probable domestic structure, its outline preserved only as post-holes, stake-holes, and the ghost lines of curving slot trenches, the narrow channels dug to receive upright timbers or planks. A pit associated with this phase returned a radiocarbon date of 3955 to 3792 cal BC, placing the activity firmly in the fourth millennium before the common era. The pottery recovered was particularly striking in its quantity and variety: sherds from at least five Early Neolithic carinated bowls, vessels named for the sharp angular shoulder that distinguishes their profile, and fragments from 22 Late Neolithic Grooved Ware vessels. Grooved Ware, a flat-based, bucket-shaped pottery decorated with applied cordons and incised lines, is often associated with ceremonial contexts, and its presence here in such numbers suggests the site carried significance well beyond simple domestic use. By the Late Bronze Age, the activity had taken on a more clearly structured character. Excavators identified a timber circle, two four-post-hole and slot-trench structures, a circular slot-trench structure, a four-post structure, a palisade of stake-holes, and a saddle quern bed-stone, the latter a flat grinding stone used to process grain, indicating some level of agricultural or food-processing activity alongside whatever ceremonial or communal purpose the timber circle served.
What makes Scart quietly remarkable is not any single feature but the layering. The plateau was not a place people passed through; they returned to it, built on it, and left traces in the ground across an extraordinary stretch of time, all of it invisible until the road scheme brought excavators to the field.
