Well, Moneymore, Co. Louth

Brought to light in 1996 during a pre-development excavation, the feature turned out not to be an isolated discovery but one element within a small cluster of remains pointing to organised, settled occupation.

The excavation, carried out under licence number 96E0161, revealed the well alongside what appears to have been a medieval house and a stone-lined pit. Stone-lined pits of this kind were common in medieval rural and domestic contexts, used variously for storage, drainage, or the containment of waste, though their precise function depends heavily on what survives within and around them. The pairing of a domestic structure with a dedicated water source is a fairly legible arrangement, suggesting a household that had invested some effort in its infrastructure. Whether the three features were in use simultaneously is the sort of question that excavation evidence alone can only partially answer, but their proximity makes a relationship between them plausible. The information was communicated by Eoin Corcoran of Archaeological Consultancy Services Limited, whose team carried out the work on the ground.