County: Kildare Site name: RATHMORE WEST
Sites and Monuments Record No.: SMR 20:9 Licence number: 98E0145
Author: Emmet Byrnes for Cultural Resource Development Services, Campus Innovation Centre
Site type: Settlement deserted - medieval
Period/Dating: Multi-period
ITM: E 695042m, N 719003m
Latitude, Longitude (decimal degrees): 53.212944, -6.577050
Test excavation was carried out as part of a pre-development impact assessment before the construction of a house. The site, the boundaries of which preserved the outline of a burgage plot, was a landscaped garden at the rear of an existing dwelling-house in the centre of the village of Rathmore and to the east of the motte and church. The site, before being made into a garden, was occupied by a farmyard and associated outbuildings.
Four trenches were excavated, and a series of medieval and post-medieval features was uncovered, overlain by two major phases of disturbance. The most recent phase of disturbance was the redeposited remains of the levelled farm outbuildings. The second and earlier phase of disturbance, a matrix of dark brown, friable, sandy clay, contained occasional pieces of red brick, mortar, coal and charcoal. Finds included several sherds of modern china and blackware, as well as a few sherds of North Leinster cooking ware and a local ware of probable 13th/14th-century date. There was also a broken chert nodule and a multi-planar chert core.
This disturbance extended down as far as the natural sand, into which the medieval and post-medieval features had been cut and hence preserved. However, they were clearly significantly truncated by the later disturbance. The first feature, effectively located in the centre of the site, was a simple, clay-bound, north-south-orientated wall made from whole and broken limestone cobbles. There was a thin gravel deposit abutting it on the east side, and a clay pipe stem found on the surface of this gravel deposit provided a date somewhere between the late 17th and mid-19th century. The other features, which occurred at the eastern end of the site, were the vestiges of a number of truncated medieval refuse pits, ranging from 0.08m to 0.2m in depth and 0.4m to 0.6m in diameter. Finds from the fill, a friable, sandy loam ranging from brown to dark brown, included sherds of both North Leinster cooking ware and the local ware of probable 13th/14th-century date, as well as a few fragments of both pig and avid bone.
Monitoring, following from the impact assessment, was carried out under an extension to the same licence. The stripping of topsoil and the excavation of the foundations for the four external walls of the dwelling-house were monitored. On the eastern side of the site the foundation trenches extended down to and impinged upon the areas of the natural, sandy subsoil previously exposed. However, on the western side they did not penetrate the modern disturbance. No further archaeological material or deposits were discovered in these areas.
On the east side of the site, where the foundation trenches were widened by c. 0.5m for a chimney breast, and on the south side, where the foundations were stepped out to accommodate the rear porch, further archaeological deposits were uncovered. In the area of the chimney breast another small truncated refuse pit, measuring 0.25m in diameter and 0.06m in depth, was uncovered, and in the area of the rear porch a second pit, measuring 1.4m in diameter and 0.45m in depth, was also revealed. There were two finds: a single sherd of medieval pottery and a small animal bone.
Roebuck Castle, Dublin 4
