EMAP_Progress_Reports_2009_2.pdf - The Heritage Council

Kildare
Pollardstown, Co. Kildare
Early Medieval Settlement Enclosure.
Grid Ref: N775151 (27750/21510)
SMR No: N/A
Excavation Licence: E000098
Excavation Duration/Year: 1972.
Site Director: T. Fanning (Office of Public Works)
The site consisted of a double-banked enclosure, with an intervening ditch, set on an esker
ridge. Gravel quarrying had destroyed a portion of the site, but from earlier maps it was
estimated to have measured 70m by 80m (Fig. 175). Future quarrying threatened to destroy
the entire site, thus occasioning a large-scale excavation of the remaining features.
The nature of the destruction meant that no structural features were discovered in the
interior. An occupation layer (0.2m deep), abutting the enclosure bank however, was
excavated. This was found to include animal bone, charcoal, and a couple of fragments of
iron slag. A number of iron artefacts were also recovered including two stirrups, an
arrowhead, a buckle, three iron rods, and six nails. The potentially militaristic nature of parts
of this assemblage, and its potential late date (the stirrups and arrowhead were dated by the
excavator to the twelfth/thirteenth centuries) would suggest that this site may have either
been re-occupied during these centuries, or may have been constructed at this time as an
Anglo-Norman ringwork.
Fig. 175: Plan of Pollardstown, Co. Kildare (after Fanning 1973-4, 252).
Reference:
Fanning, T. 1973–1974. Excavation of a ringfort at Pollardstown, Co. Kildare. Journal of the Kildare
Archaeological and Historical Society, 15(3), 251–61.
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