County: Louth Site name: BALLINLOUGH
Sites and Monuments Record No.: SMR 11:15 Licence number: 02E1159
Author: Kieran Campbell
Site type: Pit
Period/Dating: Undetermined
ITM: E 699787m, N 803307m
Latitude, Longitude (decimal degrees): 53.969413, -6.479069
The site of a single-storey dwelling-house and garage at Ballinlough, Knockbridge, lies 150m south-west of a field that contains an archaeological complex, consisting of three ring-ditches and an enclosure that were revealed on an aerial photograph. Monitoring took place on 22 and 23 July 2002 during topsoil-stripping and the excavation of foundation trenches.
A deposit of heat-fractured stones was exposed and excavated during the removal of topsoil toward the south-east corner of the site. It was subcircular, 0.6m in diameter and 0.16m deep, and consisted of heat-fractured stones (up to 110mm) in a friable, charcoal-stained, dark grey/black, sandy, silty clay. It is likely that the stones were contained in a shallow pit, but the cut for the pit was not well defined because of the shallowness of the deposit and the stony nature of the fill. The feature was not truncated by the topsoil-stripping but may have been disturbed by ploughing. The single pit strongly hints at the presence nearby of a fulacht fiadh, probably on the margins of the wet hollow 34m south-east of the development site. The writer was informed that the hollow fills with a large body of water during the winter months.
6 St Ultan’s, Laytown, Drogheda, Co. Louth
