2000:0148 - NEWTOWN, Cork

In late July and early August 2000 excavations were undertaken at Newtown, the site of a mid-17th-century star-shaped fort and associated deserted village site. The site is located one mile north of Bantry town in County Cork and was established in the 1650s by Broghil during the course of the Anglo-Dutch war of 1652/3. The excavation took place as part of a post-graduate student training programme at the University of Ulster within the context of a broader maritime archaeological landscape project within the Bantry and Beara region.

Two 7m-by-1m test-trenches were opened up within the interior of the fort and in the area of the village. A previous geophysical and topographic survey, undertaken in tandem with the Applied Geophysics Unit at NUI, Galway, had revealed a number of interesting subsurface features that warranted intrusive investigation.

The excavation in the fort uncovered the lowermost portion of a guardhouse wall with a internal cobbled surface and a slate roof. This ran parallel to the earthen rampart of the fort, which had an internal stone facing. The fort was abandoned after twenty or thirty years and quickly fell into decay. The second trench was sited on the periphery of the town settlement where geophysics had revealed a series of property boundaries, a lane or hollow-way running through the site and the site of an earlier ringfort.

Excavations uncovered the foundations of the gable end of a rectangular possible house structure, which was firmly dated on the basis of in situ finds to the middle of the 17th century. The site was abandoned by the end of the 17th century and was later incorporated into an 18th-century demesne. Larger-scale excavation is scheduled to take place at the site during 2001.