2012:240 - Orchard Sensory Garden, Stewarts Care, Mill Lane, Palmerstown, Dublin

A programme of monitoring and metal-detection was conducted during landscaping works close to DU017-025, listed as a ring barrow. The monument in question, although listed as ring barrow, might better be described as an earthwork, or overgrown tree ring. It comprises a continuous encircling bank (c. 15m east-west by 19m and up to 1m high) on the crest and upper eastern side of the hillock, facing and visible from the Liffey valley. An external ditch (not mentioned in the RMP notes) is visible to the south. The slightly-raised interior is featureless. If this monument is a ring barrow, then it has almost certainly been modified on a number of occasions, most recently perhaps as a demesne landscape feature.

The site of the landscaping works covers a sub-rectangular area c. 35m across on the west-facing slopes of a small steep-sided hill. The edge of DU017-025 is located 13m to the east, at the summit of the hillock. Excavations through the hillock to build a sunken garden exposed a consistent stratigraphy: the uppermost 0.65m (to north) to 0.35m (to south) layer comprised mixed 20^th-century material associated with modern building to the south. Below this was 0.15m thick layer of buried topsoil with 19^th- and 20^th-century material. This overlay natural subsoil (a stony yellowish-grey clay) reached at a depth of 0.8m in the north and 0.45m in south. The backfill of the test-trenches excavated here in 2001 by Helen Kehoe was also identified (Excavations 2001, No. 458, 01E0894), and the overall findings agreed with her conclusion that the western side of the hillock on which the monument sits was heavily landscaped in recent times.

Archaeology Plan, 32 Fitzwilliam Place, Dublin 2