1999:276 - KILTALOWN HOUSE, Tallaght, Dublin

A survey and small-scale excavation of a tree-lined earthwork at Kiltalown House, Tallaght, were carried out in March 1998. This earthwork was not recorded as an archaeological feature in the Sites and Monuments Record. It was reported to the National Monuments and Historic Properties Service in early 1996 by a local study association, the Heritage Awareness Group. In her response to the Heritage Awareness Group, Geraldine Stout suggested that the earthwork might be identified as part of the Pale boundary earthwork. The aim of the work was to establish the archaeological significance of the earthwork before the proposed widening of the Tallaght-Blessington road, which runs along its southern part.

The earthwork runs for a length of c. 330m and encloses a semi-oval area with a maximum diameter of 160m. Archaeological testing involved the excavation of two trenches. In one cutting, measuring 9.4m north-south by 1.4m, root action had destroyed archaeological levels. The other cutting, measuring 9.2m north-south by 1.7m, was more productive. Positioned alongside the modern roadway in a part of the site threatened by destruction, it embraced the top of the bank and part of the gentle slope of the bank southwards towards the road, as well as the scarp face of the bank on the northern side and the full observed width of the ditch on the north of the bank.

Although the top of the bank had dense roots, on the crest was found a shallow, flat-bottomed gully, 0.8m wide at the top and 0.5m wide at the base. This had been cut directly into the natural soil to an average depth of 0.2m. Thus it appears that the bank was formed not by a mounding-up of material but by the scarping of natural soil to create a ditch to the north. Cut into the base of the gully in the south-east corner of the excavated area was a post-hole measuring c. 0.2m (east-west) by 0.25m at its top. Two stones were positioned on its east and west sides; the former, which was rectangular, had shattered in situ, and much of it was removed during excavation. The sides of the post-hole descended nearly vertically to a depth of at least 0.25m; the post-hole had been colonised by roots, and its original depth could not be ascertained. The soil fill of the post-hole was identical to that of the layer immediately above the natural layer in the bank.

The Kiltalown earthwork belongs to the late medieval tradition of protective enclosure that reaches its apogee in the attempted enclosure of the English Pale in 1494–5, and the identification of it as part of the Pale is a reasonable one, but it may equally have enclosed an area of medieval parkland.

Editor's note: This summary, though of work carried out during 1998, was received too late for inclusion in the bulletin of that year.

Department of Archaeology, University College Dublin, for Margaret Gowen and Co. Ltd.