County: Dublin Site name: LAMBAY ISLAND
Sites and Monuments Record No.: N/A Licence number: 01E0016
Author: Gabriel Cooney, Department of Archaeology, University College
Site type: No archaeology found
Period/Dating: N/A
ITM: E 731636m, N 750815m
Latitude, Longitude (decimal degrees): 53.490867, -6.016251
Test excavation and monitoring were carried out on Lambay Island, Rush, Co. Dublin, in April 2001 to fulfil a condition of planning permission from Fingal County Council for the erection of a wind generator. The site is in the north-west portion of the island, at a height of 48m above OD, in the south-west corner of a field known on the island as the ‘Bull Field North’.
Five test-pits were excavated in the area of the wind generator, positioned in the places to be disturbed by the construction of the central plinth and ground supports. Monitoring was undertaken of the cable route between the site and the castle and farmyard complex.
No stratified archaeological deposits or features were discovered and it was clear that the programme of farm improvements undertaken in the 1950s had removed any substantial trace of preceding activities down to the level of subsoil. Practically every durable artefact from prehistoric to modern periods preserved there had been redeposited and remixed within the cultivation soil with each incidence of ploughing.
Similarly, within the environs of the farmyard the predominant deposits related to the construction, maintenance and modification of the buildings over the last two centuries, with a build-up of garden soil in the smaller fields contiguous with the complex.
Belfield, Dublin 4
