County: Kerry Site name: DINGLE: Farrannakilla
Sites and Monuments Record No.: SMR 43:224 Licence number: 02E0586
Author: Linda Lynch, Aegis Archaeology Ltd.
Site type: No archaeology found
Period/Dating: N/A
ITM: E 444483m, N 601256m
Latitude, Longitude (decimal degrees): 52.141247, -10.272138
Monitoring of all groundworks was carried out during the development of a 22-unit two-storey apartment building and ancillary works at Farrannakilla, off Green Street, in Dingle town. The eastern half of the site lay within the zone of archaeological potential of Dingle as identified on the Urban Archaeological Survey. The site had previously been subject to an assessment, including test-trenching, by Simon Ó Faoláin (Excavations 2001, No. 562, 01E1097). The testing identified a ‘probable ditch’ and a bank of earth as a surviving field boundary. A single worked flint was recovered from the upper levels of the fill of the ditch.
The site measured c. 45m east–west by a maximum of 57m. The entire area was stripped to subsoil to facilitate the development. Considerable volumes of modern construction debris had previously been dumped in the southern half of the site, raising the ground level in that area. The topsoil in the northern half of the site was a mid-brown/grey, silty sand with occasional flecks of charcoal and oyster-shell fragments with an average depth of 0.25m. This overlay an orange/yellow silty sand with occasional patches of grey, gravelly deposits. The gravel became more frequent with greater depth. Iron pan was evident in sporadic patches.
Considerable evidence of earth-dug and stone-lined drains, as well as clay water pipes, was found throughout the site. In the western part of the site fourteen pits filled with modern debris were uncovered. They had been dug c. 0.5m into the subsoil. These north–south-aligned pits were the remains of the sockets for large concrete piles with steel girders, the vestiges of a now demolished line of outhouses. The ‘ditch’ identified during the testing of the site was revealed as a natural feature, probably an infilled streambed. The surviving field boundary identified in the testing of the site was actually the embanked stripped topsoil from a small lane in the area that had been constructed in the past decade for access to the nearby library. Local information revealed that the site had been extensively used in the past as a piggery and slaughterhouse and that until recently some of the water that flowed extensively throughout the site had been channelled out to a font on Green Street. Nothing of archaeological significance was observed during the monitoring.
16 Avondale Court, Corbally, Limerick
