County: Laois Site name: TOBERBOE
Sites and Monuments Record No.: SMR 35:33 Licence number: 01E0472
Author: Dominic Delany
Site type: No archaeology found
Period/Dating: N/A
ITM: E 637833m, N 674813m
Latitude, Longitude (decimal degrees): 52.822956, -7.438666
Monitoring of topsoil-stripping was undertaken on the site of a proposed dwelling-house at Toberboe, Co. Laois, on 5 June 2001. The site is in the immediate vicinity of an enclosure site, described in the Archaeological inventory of County Laois (Sweetman et al. 1995) as a ‘cropmark of the western half of subcircular enclosure’.
The monitored areas comprised the house site, access road and percolation area. The house site is located on gently rising ground at the south-west edge of a natural ridge, which traverses the development site from east to west. Monitoring revealed that the ridge consists of an outcrop of grey/white silty sand and gravel. It rises to the north-east of the house site and the sand/gravel outcrop appeared just on the field surface in the north-east corner of the stripped area.
No trace of an enclosure feature was discovered during monitoring. It is possible that the sand and gravel outcrop is related to the cropmark site but the extent of the stripped area was insufficient to verify or refute this suggestion.
Reference
P.D. Sweetman, O. Alcock and B. Moran (comps) 1995 Archaeological inventory of County Laois. Dublin.
31 Ashbrook, Oranmore, Co. Galway
