2024:406 - Cloondara, Longford

It is proposed to develop ground within the village of Cloondara, Co. Longford for a mixed housing project. Longford County Council referred the proposal to the Development Applications Unit (DAU) of the Department of Housing, Local Government and Heritage who, in their response, noted that the proposed development is large in scale and given the scale and extent of the proposed development it could impact on subsurface archaeological remains. They stated that in line with national policy the Department recommended that an Archaeological Impact Assessment (AIA), should be prepared to assess any impact on archaeological remains within the proposed development site.
The preparatory work for the compilation of the AIA revealed that the site had, until the early 2000s, been part of the tannery works associated with the nearby mill complex. Areas of associated hard standings and concrete foundations as well as large settling tanks are still visible across the site. It is not clear how much disturbance the tannery development, works and demolition would have caused, but it is likely to have been substantial. Nonetheless as the DAU pointed out, the proposed development is large in scale and given the scale and extent…it could impact on subsurface archaeological remains.
It was proposed to test the subject site via a series of machine-dug archaeological test trenches of varying lengths, but spaced at roughly 10m intervals across the footprint of the houses, access roads and service lines. The testing was carried out on 2 and 3 July 2024.
Test trenching revealed that the western side of the site originally sloped quite steeply down from east to west, presumably a natural fall-away towards the course of the Camlin River. The debris from the demolition of the industrial outbuildings was dumped into this area, levelling up the western half of the site, with considerable damage caused to the underlying natural alluvial deposits. Elsewhere, the construction of the hard core-built yards had effectively scarped much of the south-east quadrant of the site, with nothing of archaeological interest uncovered following the removal of the access road to the north.
Nothing of archaeological significance was uncovered.