County: Dublin Site name: Ballalease North AA6, Donabate
Sites and Monuments Record No.: n/a Licence number: 21E0674
Author: Liam Coen c/o Archer Heritage
Site type: Multi-period settlement activity
Period/Dating: —
ITM: E 723700m, N 750365m
Latitude, Longitude (decimal degrees): 53.488744, -6.135961
Excavations revealed a circular ditched enclosure less than 20m in internal diameter whose eastern arc had been truncated by a ditch that was part of an 18th- or early 19th-century field system. A juvenile human burial had been interred in the enclosure ditch and was radiocarbon dated to 650-780 cal. 2ẟ AD (UBA 48273; 1309 +/- 27 BP), in the early medieval period. Orientated in the traditional east-west manner, no significant illness or violent trauma could be identified from its skeleton.
Two smaller concentric curvilinear features, possible slot trenches for a palisade fence, were traced along the interior of the southern and eastern arcs of the enclosure ditch. Charcoal from one of these possible slot trenches was dated to 1620-1510 cal. 2ẟ BC (UBA 48274; 3298 +/- 28 BP), in the Middle Bronze Age.
The remaining features from the excavation comprised undated pits and furrows alongside the early modern linear and curvilinear field boundaries. Finds included a residual Grooved Ware pottery sherd dating from c. 2800-2500 BC in the enclosure ditch fill alongside a granite rotary disc quern stone, which are generally dated from anytime in the first millennium AD. A number of flint artefacts were retrieved from across the site including a flint fabricator from the enclosure ditch fill and an unfinished barbed-and-tanged arrowhead from an early modern field ditch. A modest faunal assemblage was retrieved from the excavation and the range of animals from the enclosure ditch fills, cattle, sheep/goat, deer, pig, horse and dog, indicated food waste and a probable domestic purpose for the enclosure.
Unit 1 Tenure Business Park, Monasterboice, Drogheda, Co. Louth A92 K2VF
