County: Roscommon Site name: DEMESNE
Sites and Monuments Record No.: RO026-030 Licence number: 05E0036
Author: Christopher Read, North West Archaeological Services
Site type: Designed landscape - tree-ring
Period/Dating: Modern (AD 1750-AD 2000)
ITM: E 567580m, N 780245m
Latitude, Longitude (decimal degrees): 53.770789, -8.491781
A ringfort is situated in a field adjacent to the west of the site of the proposed development. The site is also a few 100m north of a castle site (SMR 26:28), situated in the vicinity of Castlereagh House. The development will include the construction of 100 houses on a 16-acre site. The development site comprises two green fields with higher ground on the north-western side, sloping down to the east and south and then rising again to the south. Test-trenching was completed between 31 January and 3 February 2005. Sixteen trenches were excavated to the top of the archaeology, where present and otherwise to the level of undisturbed natural. The trenches were all 1.5m wide and had a combined length of 2600m.
A number of substantial ditch features were revealed in many of the trenches, particularly in Trenches 3, 5, 6 and 7 in the northern part of the site and in Trenches 10–12 in the central part of the site. No dating evidence was forthcoming from the features apart from a few sherds of post-medieval/early modern pottery. Given the site’s location within an 18th/19th-century demesne associated with Castlereagh House and its proximity to a possible tree ring, early editions of the OS maps were consulted. These maps clearly show the site divided into three irregular-shaped fields. The ditch feature cut by Trenches 10–12 on a north-west/south-east axis conforms exactly to a field boundary clearly represented on the first- and second-edition of the OS maps. In addition, a peculiar ‘light bulb’-shaped feature in the northernmost field is very ephemerally indicated on the first edition and much more clearly on the second edition (it is gone by the third edition). This area was clearly planted and, with its proximity to the possible tree ring in the adjacent field to the west and its location within the demesne of Castlereagh House, it is likely to be an early 19th-century landscape feature.
No further evidence of archaeological activity was detected.
Cloonfad Cottage, Cloonfad, Carrick-on-Shannon, Co. Leitrim
