AR01055_EMAP_Gazetteer_of_Sites_4-2_10.pdf - The Heritage ...

Introduction
(e.g. Three Irish Gas Pipelines: New Archaeological Evidence in Munster (Gowen 1988);
Pieces of the Past: Archaeological Excavations by the Department of the Environment for
Northern Ireland 1970-1986 (Hamlin and Lynn 1988)). More recently the series of excellent
seminar proceedings and monographs produced by the National Roads Authority (e.g.
O’Sullivan and Stanley 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008; Stanley et al 2009, 2010) have been
instrumental in popularising excavations undertaken on various road schemes in the 2000s.
A large number of these summaries are, however, based on unpublished (or incompletely
published) excavation reports. These sites were identified by EMAP primarily from the
excavators’ previous concise summaries included in the Excavations Bulletin, and were then
augmented by a more detailed excavation report received either directly from the excavator,
or consulted at the Department of the Environment (St Stephen’s Green, Dublin), or the
Northern Ireland Environment Agency (Hill Street, Belfast). Internet resources were also
highly important in collating these excavations, especially the NRA website
(http://www.nra.ie/Archaeology/), which has made available excavation reports on a number
of major roadways, as well as the home pages of certain commercial companies, for example
the innovative and hopefully influential Eachtra Journal recently produced online by Eachtra
Archaeological Projects (http://eachtra.ie/index.php/journal/).
As already mentioned, due to the nature of such works as this, there is always the possibility
– nay certainty - that certain key sites have been omitted. The starting date for the gazetteer
(1930) means, for example, that H.C. Lawlor’s excavations at Nendrum, Co. Down are not
summarised here (Lawlor 1925). The general closing date (2005) is dictated by the most upto-date
version of the Excavations Bulletin, but certainly many post-2005 excavations are
included here since they have appeared in other publications or websites. Time constraints,
and problems in accessing certain reports, have also meant that certain excavations (e.g.
those in Limerick City) have not been summarised here. In a similar fashion it has not been
able to reproduce site plans for every excavation since a number of excavation reports do not
include relevant illustrations. In short, although many settlements summaries have been
produced by EMAP in 2009 and 2010 (incorporating an eleven-month period and including the
writing of the Vol. I report), unfortunately there is much that has been omitted, largely due to
the brief period of time available to us.
A Note on Terminologies
In terms of terminology, we have attempted to use standard terms for site types. The terms
‘rath’ and ‘ringfort’, which cover the predominant settlement type from this period, have often
been used interchangeably, although ‘ringfort’ tends to be preferred in the Republic of
Ireland, and ‘rath’ in Northern Ireland. Partly to resolve this conflict, and partly to deal with
the issue of ‘non-circular’ enclosure (Kinsella 2010), it was decided to reclassify all these as
‘settlement enclosures’. As such there are five major groupings of early medieval settlement
types discussed in this volume (Fig. 1).
Key to symbols used in county distribution maps.
The site summaries are divided by county (only counties Carlow and Cavan have a nil return).
Within the counties, the site descriptions are arranged alphabetically by townland, with the
exception of those sites, such as Lisnagun, Co. Cork (O’Sullivan et al 1998), which are more
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