County: Sligo Site name: BARROE
Sites and Monuments Record No.: N/A Licence number: 03E1814
Author: Martin A. Timoney
Site type: Excavation - miscellaneous
Period/Dating: Modern (AD 1750-AD 2000)
ITM: E 571176m, N 837470m
Latitude, Longitude (decimal degrees): 54.285202, -8.442664
Testing took place at a proposed development site of 2.82 acres for a house and tennis court, in Barroe townland, east of Sligo town. The site is flat with rushes and several redundant drains. A ringfort, SMR 15:22, is 65m from the site.
About 700m2 were opened in seven trenches. There was 0.16m of sod and brown soil over heavily leached glacial sticky soil. Several land drains were detected and shown to be superficial. One drain on the south-east side, in Trench 5, was more substantial and had a greater depth of brown soil. At 0.2m below the ground surface, at the top of the glacial soil, the drain was 0.7m wide. The base of the drain was 0.5m below this. The base was flat on the west side and rounded on the eastern side. The fill was of soil, some with organic material in it, the result of silting and subsequent root penetration.
About 1.5m to the north, a narrow drain, 0.15m wide and 0.2m deep, was filled with broken limestone and two pieces of yellow brick. These date the drain to some time in the last two centuries. The only other 'finds' encountered were a few scraps of crockery and fragments of red brick in the upper soil.
A drain noted in Trenches 5b, 6 and 7 was 0.7m wide, but the base generally was no more than 70mm below the level of the top of the underling undisturbed glacial daub. Where it crossed Trench 7 it was 1.3m wide, but the base was 0.25m below the level of the top of the glacial daub. The fill was more gravelly or less clayey than the soil encountered elsewhere in this field. Clearly positioned towards the middle of this fill were pieces of a milk-cooling dish of 19th- or 20th-century vintage. Also found in the top of the fill were a curtain ring, the mouthpiece of a clay pipe and fragments of red brick and yellow brick. None of the drains gave any suggestion of antiquity.
Bóthar an Chorainn, Keash, Co. Sligo
