County: Offaly Site name: CAPPANCUR
Sites and Monuments Record No.: SMR 17:8 Licence number: 99E0214
Author: Dominic Delany
Site type: Enclosure
Period/Dating: Undetermined
ITM: E 636880m, N 725211m
Latitude, Longitude (decimal degrees): 53.275948, -7.447030
Test excavation was undertaken at the site of a proposed dwelling on 24 May 1999. The site (75m north-south by 45m) is adjacent to a church site and a graveyard. The Archaeological inventory of County Offaly describes 'a roughly rectangular graveyard within which Comerford (1883, 305) noted a small portion of a ruined structure possibly representing the remains of a church'. There are no visible remains of this structure at ground level, but a modern concrete enclosure, presumably representing the outline of the church, stands at the centre of the graveyard. The existing graveyard boundary is D-shaped (maximum dimensions 55m east-west by 35m), and, according to the SMR files, 'there is a strong possibility that the "D" is but the NNE half of an earlier circular enclosure'.
Four test-trenches were mechanically excavated at locations corresponding to the footprint of the proposed development. The topsoil was a grey/brown, silty sand, 0.25m thick, overlying a yellowish/brown, silty sand subsoil. Outcrops of shattered limestone bedrock and grey, silty sand and gravel were encountered at a depth of 0.45m. A flat/round-bottomed ditch, 2.9m wide and 0.75m deep, was encountered in three of the trenches, and this appears to represent portions of a continuous feature, possibly an enclosure associated with the nearby ecclesiastical site. The ditch fill was a light brown, clayey sand with infrequent inclusions of angular cobbles and boulders, animal bone and molluscs. No datable finds were recovered from the fill. In Trench 4 a deposit of orange, sandy clay, 0.4m thick, was present on the north lip of the ditch, and this may represent part of a levelled internal bank. Similar spreads of orange, sandy clay were encountered in Trenches 2 and 3, albeit at some distance from the ditch. It should be noted that the ditch encountered during testing is not aligned with the circular enclosing element that forms the north boundary of the existing graveyard.
A second, smaller ditch was encountered 6m south of the main ditch in Trench 4. It was 1.8m wide, narrowing to 0.8m at the limit of excavation, which was 0.4m below the top of the ditch. The fill was similar to that of the main ditch, and the two features are probably contemporary.
The proposed development would directly affect the archaeological features encountered during testing, and planning permission was refused for this reason.
31 Ashbrook, Oranmore, Co. Galway
