County: Meath Site name: RATOATH: Dunshaughlin Road
Sites and Monuments Record No.: N/A Licence number: 01E0174
Author: Rosanne Meenan
Site type: No archaeology found
Period/Dating: N/A
ITM: E 701889m, N 751892m
Latitude, Longitude (decimal degrees): 53.507140, -6.463991
A pair of stone houses, late 19th-century in date, were demolished at this site, to be replaced by an apartment block. An architectural survey was carried out on the houses before their demolition.
Three trenches tested this development site, two of them along the long front and back walls of the development and a perpendicular third trench in the middle of the proposed development.
At the front of the site, i.e. the north side, some rubble deriving from the demolition of the 19th-century houses was exposed. This was mixed with the loose black clay topsoil. Drainage features were exposed in the west ends of both long trenches; these were the same features extending from the north to the south of the site. One was a stone-filled drain which yielded a plastic bottle in the fill. The other drain was filled with loose grey silty clay. Both features bottomed at approximately 0.5m below the present ground level. In Trench 3, at the north end, stone blocks mixed with black clay were exposed. These represented demolition rubble from the stone houses. Natural subsoil was a mixed grey and yellow boulder clay, sandy in places and with gravel varying in consistency.
Nothing of archaeological significance was exposed in the trenches and no artefacts were found.
Roestown, Drumree, Co. Meath
