Kiln - corn-drying, Portmarnock, Co. Dublin
Co. Dublin |
Kilns
Somewhere beneath a housing estate south of Station Road in Portmarnock, Co. Dublin, there once lay the scorched remains of a cereal-drying kiln that had been quietly underground for roughly fifteen hundred years.
It is there no longer. The feature was fully excavated and removed in advance of residential development, and the houses that now occupy the ground carry no visible sign of what was uncovered. What makes this particular absence worth noting is not the loss itself, which is common enough in Irish archaeology, but the detail that survived the dig and the story that detail tells.
The kiln was recorded during an excavation carried out between January and May 2017, directed by Gill McLoughlin of Courtney Deery Heritage Consultancy Ltd under licence 16E0613. It was found within a large sub-circular ditched enclosure, roughly 77 metres east to west at its widest, situated east of the Portmarnock railway line and adjacent to an upstanding earthwork known as the Portmarnock mound. The kiln itself, designated C119, was figure-of-eight in plan, a shape common to early Irish cereal-drying kilns, which typically consisted of a deep bowl where grain was heated and a shallower flue through which warm air was drawn. This example was aligned north to south, measuring 2.5 metres long and 1.65 metres wide, with four flat baffle stones, three limestone and one sandstone, placed at the junction between bowl and flue to regulate airflow and heat. The lowest fill contained charred barley, wheat, and oat, and a sample of that charred barley was radiocarbon dated to between AD 408 and 584, placing the kiln at the transition between the late Iron Age and the early medieval period. Notably, the grain had not been cleared out before the kiln was abandoned, which the excavation report suggests may indicate the kiln was left after a fire rather than decommissioned in an orderly way. Later fills contained animal bone, oyster shell, and slag consistent with smithing activity, pointing to a second phase of use, or perhaps reuse, of the cut for metalworking.
There is nothing to see at the site today. The excavation records, including McLoughlin's 2019 final report submitted to the National Monuments Service on behalf of Sherman Oaks Ltd., represent what remains of the monument. For anyone with a particular interest in the enclosure complex, the upstanding Portmarnock mound nearby, east of the railway line, is still visible and offers at least a landscape context for where these features once lay.