County: Sligo Site name: OLLAMURRAY, Inishmurray
Sites and Monuments Record No.: SMR 5:1–5:2 Licence number: 00E0484
Author: Jerry O’Sullivan and Tomás Ó Carragáin
Site type: Enclosure, Leacht and Prehistoric site - flint scatter
Period/Dating: Multi-period
ITM: E 556745m, N 854070m
Latitude, Longitude (decimal degrees): 54.433335, -8.666672
As with the site at Relickoran (see Excavations 2000, No. 888), excavation of this enclosed leacht, a National Monument site, was commissioned by Dúchas The Heritage Service in response to ongoing coastal erosion.
Before excavation the site consisted of a roughly square rubble cairn, or leacht, within a quadrilateral drystone enclosure. The surrounding wall was no more than 0.5m high and enclosed an area of 6.2m east–west by 5.7m. The leacht itself was 2.2m east–west by 2m and 0.5m high. These features stood hard upon a low cliff edge overlooking a narrow, rocky inlet. The leacht was partly cast down by storm damage, and the enclosure wall was almost entirely lost on the seaward side.
Excavation revealed that the enclosing wall was of at least two phases, a primary build founded on edge-set slabs, masked by later random rubble rebuilding. Between the leacht and enclosing wall was a roughly laid, patchy pavement of irregular flat slabs. The leacht was also found to consist of more than one phase, with extensions in the form of additional piles of coursed rubble added at the south and west sides, and the whole was raised at least once by mounded random rubble on the surface.
Within the base of the leacht and forming part of its primary build were two large stones with a white mineral accretion on two faces. This was thought at first to be lime mortar but was found by thin-section analysis to be a natural mineral formation.
A thin, peaty soil layer underlay the leacht. Within this layer, a scatter of worked flints, large charcoal fragments and at least one large pit suggested a much earlier occupation of the site. Amongst the worked flints was a fragment of arrowhead—a tang with one surviving barb—likely to be of Late Neolithic/Early Bronze Age date.
The only other finds were a few items of modern debris recovered from soils around the leacht, including a sherd of printed tableware, a metal boot heel and a clay pipe stem. There was no evidence for burials associated with any phase of the site.
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