2022:564 - CASTLEPOOK CAVE, Castlepook South, Cork

Dr Richard Jennings (Liverpool john Moores University), Dr Helen Lewis (University College Dublin) and Dr Ruth Carden (Wildlife Ecological and Osteological Consultancy), and Dr Patrick Randolph-Quinney (University of Northumbria, UK) funded by the Royal Irish Academy, undertook an excavation at Castlepook Cave, Co. Cork, from May 21 to June 4 2022, aided by members of the Cork Speleological Group and the Claire Caving Club. Castlepook was last excavated in the early decades of last century, when a wealth of ice age fauna was recovered. The cave was assigned a number in the SMR register—CO017-026—on this basis of this fieldwork, but this was later called a redundant record owing to the lack of evidence for human occupation.

The aim of our fieldwork was to establish whether Pleistocene deposits survive in the cave. We focused our attention on two parts: the upper cave system—the focus of the twentieth-century excavations, and the lower cave system, which was discovered in the 1970s but not explored archaeologically.

We successfully located cave sediments in the upper cave system. Four areas of potential were located, and three of these were investigated: Entrance Gallery, Elephant Hall, and the passage running between them. In the Entrance Gallery, a pit dug into the current surface was cleaned out and box excavated to explore the remaining deposits; our expectation was that these were redeposited spoil from earlier excavations, trample and modern rubbish, and washed-in sand and/or silt. However, we did identify a spread of broken speleothem (C.104) that sealed a sandy silt layer (c.118) which contained frequent charcoal, a hazel nut shell and some animal bones, but radiocarbon dating demonstrated that the charcoal and the hazel nut shell were modern. Micromorphology samples were taken in the Entrance Gallery and Elephant Hall, including of a possible organic deposit, and these are currently under investigation.

We placed two cuttings in the lower cave system. Cutting 1 was dug in the Lower Bone Passage and measured 0.7m (north-south) x 0.45m. It was excavated through a series of sand and clay deposits to the sloping stone base of the chamber 0.4m below the chamber floor surface. Cutting 2 in Upper Bone Passage measured 0.75m (north-west/south-east) x 0.45m and was excavated through a series of sand and clay deposits to the top of the large fallen boulder. Two of these deposits contained occasional lumps of charcoal, one piece of which was submitted for radiocarbon dating. A piece of the charcoal was dated and it returned an age of 1190 +/- 20 BP. Our preliminary interpretation is that these deposits fell into this part of the cave from a roof collapse.

No cultural artefacts were identified in the excavation. A small faunal assemblage (n = 154) of a mixture of, assumed, relatively recent and potentially Pleistocene amphibian, birds and mammalian species bones were recovered mostly derived from the cave floor surface but some from stratified contexts.