County: Meath Site name: KELLS: Townparks
Sites and Monuments Record No.: N/A Licence number: —
Author: Gretta Byrne
Site type: Ecclesiastical enclosure
Period/Dating: Medieval (AD 400-AD 1600)
ITM: E 673835m, N 776017m
Latitude, Longitude (decimal degrees): 53.728583, -6.881089
A further four weeks of excavation was undertaken during April and May 1988 in advance of construction work by the Office of Public Works, which funded the excavation. Three portions of the Early Christian ditch discovered in the first season (Excavations 1987 , Site No.41) were excavated. These yielded a large quantity of artefacts including a stone spindle whorl, a socketed iron punch or awl, an iron ring, slag, fragments of a bronze ring, a bone cylinder and the head of a bone pin. There was also much animal bone. Outside the ditch, a roughly circular pit c. 1m in diameter and 0.5m deep contained a lot of charcoal and ash, but the only find was part of a polished bone pin.
Elsewhere, a series of large pits up to 1.6m deep had been dug into bedrock and natural stoney boulder clay and later backfilled with rubble containing finds of pottery, glass, metal and clay pipes ranging in date from the eighteenth to the twentieth century. The most likely explanation for these is that they were quarrypits for extracting stone.
Ballybrack, Hacketstown, Co. Carlow
