2001:123 - BLACK ROCK, Bantry House, Bantry, Cork

Research excavations were carried out in the summer of 2001 at the site of a deserted Gaelic medieval village and 17th-century English plantation town. This is currently a greenfield site, known as the West Lawn, directly to the west of Bantry House, a large 18th-century estate house. This site appears to have been abandoned in the middle of the 17th century, and all of the available evidence suggests that no further building or landscaping took place following abandonment. This is supported by all of the available cartographic and archaeological evidence, including the 18th-century estate maps of Bantry House and the first edition 6in. OS maps. This makes the site important, given its undisturbed nature and the potential for the recovery of stratified medieval and post-medieval cultural remains.

No previous archaeological work had taken place on the site prior to the initial survey work undertaken there during this summer. There are clear earthworks in the field, and both geophysical survey and topographic DGPS (Differential Global Positioning System) survey confirmed that these were cultural in character. Magnetic survey located at least two house sites as well as a number of boundary features.

Excavation took place over a two-week period at the end of August 2001. A 10m by 12m area was opened in the north-east corner of the west lawn of Bantry House. Extensive archaeological deposits were found, including a mid-17th-century house represented by the survival of its western gable foundations, which in turn overlay a more substantial and better-built rectangular structure, interpreted as a timber-built English administrative building. A palisade trench, dug late in the 16th or early in the 17th century, presumably to provide a stockade around the early plantation settlement, immediately pre-dated this building. Sixteenth-century cultivation ridges were uncovered which, interestingly, cut the foundations of a 15th/16th-century Gaelic domestic structure.

This excavation was financed by the Royal Irish Academy under the National Archaeology Committee’s research excavation scheme and by the University of Ulster.