Pit, Ballincurra, Co. Limerick
Co. Limerick |
Settlement Sites
There is a site recorded in the monuments register for County Limerick that consists, in its entirety, of a shallow pit roughly the size of a dinner plate and a slightly larger adjacent scoop in the ground.
No artefacts were ever found there. The charcoal retrieved from the soil was too fragmentary to date or even identify by species. The feature no longer exists. It is not visible on aerial photographs, was never depicted on any historic Ordnance Survey mapping, and there is a reasonable chance it was never a human-made feature at all, but simply a natural depression that happened to preserve a spread of material. It is, in other words, one of the most honestly ambiguous entries in the archaeological record of the island.
The site came to light in 2002 during topsoil-stripping along the route of the Bord Gáis Éireann Pipeline to the West, a major infrastructural project that inadvertently generated a considerable quantity of archaeological data as it cut across the Irish midlands and west. Ken Wiggins, working under licence 02E0119, first identified the features, catalogued as BGE 3/76/9, in pasture lying 145 metres east of the townland boundary with Rathcannon and 45 metres north of a local stream. Kate Taylor subsequently excavated the site under licence 02E0504. Her findings, summarised in the published pipeline report, describe a pit measuring 0.47 metres north to south by 0.43 metres, just 0.1 metres deep, with an irregular plan and profile filled with mid-brown silty clay containing some charcoal and rare crumbs of burnt clay. Alongside it sat the slightly more generous scoop, subcircular at 0.76 metres by 0.69 metres and a mere 0.07 metres deep, its bowl-shaped profile so shallow as to barely qualify as a hollow. Taylor's report, cited in Ger Grogan's 2007 synthesis of the pipeline findings, noted the possibility that the whole thing was simply a natural feature.
There is nothing to visit. The excavation is complete, the ground long since returned to pasture somewhere in the quiet stretch of County Limerick between Ballincurra and Rathcannon. What this entry in the record actually offers is a small, useful corrective to the idea that archaeology is always about discovery and meaning. Sometimes the soil gives up almost nothing, the charcoal crumbles, the artefacts fail to appear, and the pit turns out to be, quite possibly, just a pit. That uncertainty is recorded faithfully, published, and catalogued, which is, in its own way, a reasonable outcome.