Archaeological excavation in advance of the construction of a Lidl retail store and car park on the southwest portion of the Ashbourne Town Centre Development discovered the east end of the former post-medieval settlement of Killegland (for a discussion of the settlement and the tumultuous era in which it settlement was inhabited, see Frazer 2007; for more detailed analysis, see Frazer, in preparation).
The settlement, located on the south-facing slope of the Broadmeadow River valley, flanked either side of a medieval millrace and lay just upslope from three medieval (fish?) ponds fed from the river by a series of channels (‘leats’). Immediately south across the river is the site of a 15th-century tower house, Killegland Castle (RMP ME045:005), that may be situated atop the remains of an earlier medieval (Anglo-Norman) manorial seat (i.e. a motte or hall-house). Seventy metres east of the settlement, on the same side of the river, archaeological work associated with another part of the Town Centre Development located and excavated a small, partially-enclosed (13th–14th-century) medieval farmstead with adjacent earthwork field systems (see other website article and Frazer, forthcoming). A prehistoric (Bronze Age) ring ditch and cremation burial, with later, overlying Iron Age activity, were also discovered and excavated just south of the river, across from the medieval farm site (see other website article). Other old field systems associated with the medieval and post-medieval settlement in the area were also visible as earthworks prior to development. These field systems included extensive hand-dug ‘lazy bed’ cultivation ridges which were contemporary with the post-medieval Killegland settlement and which may indicate very early cultivation of an imported New World crop: potatoes.
The excavation site encompassed an area approximately 70 x 25m, and it was possible to preserve much of it in situ beneath the new development. The archaeology included the remains of five cottages and their yards, an outdoor cooking/baking oven, and a kiln for the drying of grain.
These may have been in use from as early as the late 16th century, and all were abandoned by c. 1700. The largest cottage may have contained an iron-smithy. Cottages were small, rectangular and built with unmortared stone foundations, ‘mud’/clay or turf upper walls with wooden frames, thatched wooden roofs, and smokeholes rather than chimneys. Joinery techniques that were used in the nearby medieval farm buildings a few centuries earlier had been superceded by iron nails. Probably the cottages contained only a ground floor and a storage loft; their remains were remarkably similar to—albeit smaller than—later, surviving 18th-century vernacular dwellings in east Co. Meath and north Co. Dublin. The early date for the excavated dwellings at Killegland suggests that some old cottages still standing in the region may be even older than is presently understood.
The excavated cottages correspond to the ‘cabbins’ of poor tenant labourers of ‘Cleglin’ mentioned in 17th-century documents, and finds from the excavated households illustrate a rural existence of material poverty—bereft of luxuries of the era such as tobacco, tea, imported wine and spirits, and fine ceramic tablewares—and of limited diet, with oats especially prevalent. Environmental remains demonstrate that (bread-)wheat was nevertheless under cultivation nearby, perhaps on behalf of—in the early 1600s—the local (Irish, Catholic) landlords, the Segraves. Much of the surrounding landscape at that time appeared quite similar to the way it did just a few years ago, with evidence for ash, cherry, hazel, oak, ‘pomaceous fruitwood’ (apple, pear or hawthorn), buckthorn and wet meadowland grasses nearby. Artefacts from the cottages indicate that inhabitants were farming, cooking, sewing, spinning and smithing iron. While the settlement was inhabited during the tumultuous era of the Nine Years’ War (c.1594–1603), the Wars of the Three Kingdoms (c.1639–51) and the War of the Two Kings (c.1689–91), no direct evidence for violence or civil strife was found on the site, although a single flintlock gunflint was recovered, as were a number of knives, two copper alloy firearm tools and a buckle from a sword belt. Several keys may have served to lock doors on the cottages: unusual for the period and perhaps indicative of the troubled times.
Overall, the material remains paint a vivid picture of a past that Celtic Tiger Ireland sometimes considers to be prosaic and forgettable. But in the 17th century, 70–85% of the population of Ireland were labourers, cottiers or servants like those that resided in the cottages at Killegland, and their history is therefore central to our heritage.
References Frazer, W.O. 2007. Field of Fire: Evidence for wartime conflict in a 17th-century cottier settlement in County Meath, Ireland. Journal of Conflict Archaeology 3(1): 173–96. Article also in Scorched Earth: Studies in the Archaeology of Conflict (T. Pollard and I. Banks, eds). Leiden: Brill, pp. 175–198. Frazer, W.O. forthcoming [submitted 2005]. A medieval farmstead at Killegland, Ashbourne, Co. Meath. In Medieval Rural Settlement in Ireland (C. Corlett and M. Potterton, eds). Frazer, W.O. in preparation. ‘Cleglin’: The archaeology of a 16th–17th-century rural settlement in County Meath. Simington, R.C. ed. 1940. The Civil Survey A.D. 1654-1656 County of Meath, Vol. V, with Returns of Tithes for the Meath Baronies. Stationery Office: Dublin.
