County: Waterford Site name: Shandon, Dungarvan
Sites and Monuments Record No.: N/A Licence number: 06E1113
Author: John Tierney, Eachtra Archaeological Projects, Ballycurreen Industrial Estate, Kinsale Road, Cork.
Site type: Pit/post-hole, drain, furrow, two pits, three spreads
Period/Dating: —
ITM: E 625384m, N 594069m
Latitude, Longitude (decimal degrees): 52.097956, -7.629505
Dungarvan Urban District Council requested that all of the known archaeology at a proposed development site at Shandon, Dungarvan, be excavated. This was carried out in response to an earlier assessment, including testing. The area of the development site is zoned for housing and is located south of a previously uncovered rectilinear possible Viking/
Anglo-Norman enclosure (WA031–072).
A number of previous phases of excavation have been undertaken at Shandon, Dungarvan, since 2000. Work was carried out by Deirdre Murphy, ACS (Excavations 2000, No. 990, 00E0442); by Stuart Elder and Emer Dennehy, Eachtra (Excavations 2001, Nos 1241 and 1242, 00E0442 ext. and 01E0327 respectively); by Stuart Elder and Daniel Noonan, for Eachtra (Excavations 2002, Nos 1790 and 1791, 00E0442 ext. and 02E0808 respectively). A geophysical survey was carried out by Earthsound Ltd in December 2006. A number of potential archaeological features were recorded. In May 2007 four test-trenches were excavated in the area of the proposed development site, to test the nature and extent of the geophysical anomalies. It was possible to quickly eliminate some of these features as modern and agricultural in nature. The archaeology remaining was located at the south-east end and the northern end of the site. The potential archaeology at the northern end of the site is quite close to the Viking/Anglo-Norman enclosure and will be left in situ.
A small excavation was carried out in one main area at the south-east end of the site. A pit/post-hole, a drain, a furrow, two pits and three spreads filling natural hollows were excavated. These features were all located in an area measuring 33m east–west by 18m. The features excavated were all shallow; all but one were between 0.01m and 0.13m in depth, one pit was 0.29m deep. The fills were mostly greyish-brown silty clays. The features are all quite dispersed and are not indicative of a large, intensive, settlement site but rather a number of phases of very small-scale activity; this will hopefully be corroborated by radiocarbon dates.
This phase of excavations and the previous phases of testing reinforce what was previously suspected: that the main concentration of archaeological activity is located in the vicinity of the Viking enclosure and that there were dispersed isolated incidences of archaeology further to the south.
