1994:021 - CARRIGEEN EAST, Cork

This site was excavated in an attempt to locate Elizabethan settlement as depicted on Sir Walter Raleigh's 1598 estate map for his Mogeely manor. A resistivity survey took place prior to excavation, but proved ineffective at this site.

Excavation exposed a number of ditches, dating from land-improving French drains, thought to be of the Georgian period, to probable prehistoric enclosures. Indeed, the curve of the field boundary on the map suggests that the English settlers may have used a pre-existing landmark feature as an element in the field enclosure. The presence of some of these ditches had been indicated both on the early map, and by remote sensing survey. Unfortunately the multiplicity of the ditches and the difficulty of the soil ensured that a clear picture of the east entrance to the settlement in the Plantation Period could not be obtained.

Regarding the settlement itself, only tenuous evidence for a structure was recorded in Trench D, but the features, though shallow, ran roughly parallel to the insubstantial remains of two buildings that were recorded in Trench B, and they also respected a differentiation in cobbling. This suggests that a structure chronologically related to that in Trench B had stood in Trench D. The shallow nature of the beam slots in Structure 2, in some places only 0.1m below the level of the made-up surface, may suggest the presence here of raised wooden flooring. The rougher 'exterior' cobbling found further up the slope in Trench D may indicate that the building had been dug slightly into the slope of the hillside, but as no entrance features were recorded, this cannot be verified. The features recorded in the centre of Trench D may indicate a hearth; again the paucity of corroborative evidence could invite further interpretations.

The structures at Carrigeen have several points of comparison with other excavated buildings of the Plantation Period, and it may be possible to suggest some building techniques common to the English colonists and authorities. In Structure 2, the bedding layer below the fine cobbling was similar to a layer recorded in nearby Mogeely. Here, a hard gravely loam with clay had been laid as a preparation for the ground surface of an Elizabethan structure of timber-frame construction with mortared stone foundations (Excavations 1991, 9–10). In Structure 1, the evidence for clay wall bonding corresponds to that found in an early 17th-century structure built against the bawn wall of Kilcolman Castle (see Excavations 1994, No. 29) and by Conleth Manning in 16th- to 17th-century structures at Glanworth Castle, Co. Cork (see 'A Sheela-na-Gig from Glanworth Castle, Co. Cork' in Figures From The Past, 1987, 278–82), and in similar structures dated 1641–1653 at Cloch Oughter Castle, Co. Cavan (Excavations 1987, 10–11). Given the limited amount of excavation to date on buildings of this period, it is noteworthy that the two construction techniques of prepared 'hard-packing' for house sites and of clay bonding for stone walls, which may not have been particularly common previously, are associated with these sites of Elizabethan and Jacobean colonisation.

Editor's note: this site was excavated during 1993 but arrived too late for inclusion in the bulletin of that year.

Macon, Georgia, U.S.A. and Dublin