2001:1109 - BALLYKILCLINE, Roscommon

The Centre for the Study of Rural Ireland, Illinois State University, completed its fourth and final season of excavation at the early 19th-century townland of Ballykilcline in Kilglass parish, Co. Roscommon. As in previous seasons, excavations focused on a part of the townland traditionally known as Kiltullyvary or Bungariff. The 2001 excavations concentrated on the ‘northern’ part of the 19th-century Nary farm, where excavations began in 1998. The overall focus of this research effort is to provide an anthropological, contextual understanding of early 19th-century tenant farmer life, using excavation, historical research and landscape analysis as its primary components.

The fieldwork began on 24 June and ended on 4 August, with ten undergraduate archaeology students and 23 Earthwatch volunteers.

The townland of Ballykilcline was a Crown estate directly under the control of the Commissioners of Woods and Forests. From the 1790s to 1834 the powerful Mahon family, owners of Strokestown Park House about 11km away, leased the townland from the Crown. After the Mahons lost their bid for an extension of the lease in 1834, the townland reverted to the Crown. The tenants refused to pay their rents after the Crown assumed control and they began a protracted and often violent rent strike. The Crown was only able to end the agrarian unrest with full eviction in 1847 and 1848. The townland has been largely depopulated ever since.

Thirty-four 1m by 2m units were excavated and 2,851 artefacts collected, bringing the total collection from the Nary site to 9,087 artefacts. All excavated earth was sifted through screening material to facilitate the collection of small personal artefacts, including beads and buttons. All of the artefacts date from the 1800–48 period. The artefact sample contains objects that would typically have been used inside a rural home in the early 19th century, including fine earthenware, coarse earthenware and stoneware ceramics; bottle and window glass; several iron tools; pieces of eating utensils; brass buttons of many sizes; white clay smoking-pipes; and pieces of animal bone, slate and whitewash. The most evocative artefact found, especially given the history of removal at the site, was a small brass thimble embossed with the words ‘FORGET ME NOT’. Also discovered were several tiny glass beads, some of which were probably used as weights on lace bobbins. If our supposition about the function of these beads is correct, then they, in conjunction with the thimble and a small pair of scissors found earlier, provide unique insights into the daily activities of the townland’s women, a subject of significant interest within this research endeavour.

As expected, the soil sequence encountered was identical to that encountered in the earlier seasons. Because the site has been largely undisturbed since the evictions, only five distinct soil layers occur: the sod, the topsoil, the eviction/destruction zone, the living surface, and the culturally sterile clay. Most of the artefacts were found in the eviction/destruction zone.

This year’s work mainly involved uncovering the cobble floor of one of the Nary cabins. These cabins appear on both the Ordnance Survey map and the 1836 estate plan. The excavations succeeded in uncovering the entire spatial extent of the house remains, but the work of the men who demolished the tenants’ homes after eviction was extremely thorough. Excavations revealed that they removed the largest stones, undoubtedly for new construction elsewhere, and then scraped the remaining debris to flatten it in preparation for animal grazing. Plotting the cross-mending artefacts is providing information about the site destruction activities.

The archaeology at Ballykilcline is providing important information about the material possessions of the Nary family in the 1800–48 period. Much of the more intensive research is still under way. Of specific interest is the way in which the Narys obtained mass-produced objects and incorporated them into their way of life. The question of material culture access is, of course, a central topic of interest to historical archaeologists, and our research on this important element of daily life is continuing. Much of this research will shed light on the formation of rural Irish identity during the early Union period.

The 2001 excavations were conducted as part of the larger archaeological and anthropological effort to examine the material basis of rural life before the great diaspora of the 1840s. Ballykilcline is an important research locale because of its undisturbed nature and because it was the scene of significant social unrest. The rent strike provides an intriguing counterpoint to the large numbers of English ceramics found during the excavations. The precise meaning of these ceramics, and the manner in which they were contextualised within rural life, is currently under evaluation. In 2002 we hope to move to the McDermott site on Ballykilcline north-east of the Nary site.