1993:034 - LISLEAGH II, Cork

Excavations at Lisleagh II ringfort concluded this summer, leaving some tantalising questions. Excavation of the structures continued; the best preserved round house turned out to be multi-phase and highly complex, overlying the remains of a probable earlier structure. This round house was cut in turn by the souterrain, which must therefore be late in the sequence of the site but was itself overlain by stakeholes. The area around the entrance to the souterrain was found to have been paved with a pebble floor. Evidence for a further round house was found to the west of the site, as well as large postpits and the only hearth, not, alas, associated with a structure. Time was also spent stripping off complex deposits laid to level up the site in order to tie in different areas of the site stratigraphically. Their stoniness had been 'read' by the resistivity survey as 'paving' to the west of the site inside the entrance; where they petered out just inside the bank we had read the survey as showing an inner fosse.

A complex kiln-like structure, set into a large rectangular pit, was excavated in the south-east corner of the cutting. This was cut in turn by one of the more surprising discovering on the site, a narrow V-shaped fosse c. 1.1m deep. Two lengths (south-east and south) had been excavated in previous seasons, when it was surmised that it might be associated with a trench cut for a palisade of large conjoined posts concentric to and c. 1.4m outside it. In 1993 both fosse and palisade trench were also found to the west, just inside and cutting across the original fort entrance. The fosse had then been backfilled and a round house, Early Christian in type but so far undated, was erected over the fills along its southern length. This discovery, in conjunction with the fact that the original bank had been largely levelled back into the fosse earlier in the history of the fort, has raised some interesting questions.