Crannog

The National Monuments Service's description

In 1952 drainage works on the Boyle River lowered the water level of the Lough Gara lakes, and artefacts recovered from crannogs were reported to the National Museum of Ireland. That autumn, Dr. J. Raftery and Miss E. Prendergast of the Museum staff collected artefacts from about 150 crannogs which they noted in the lakes and on the Boyle River. Dr. Raftery permitted Mr. R. E. Cross, the project engineer, to publish a map (1953) based on his own preliminary survey with numbered crannogs, a copy of which is now held in the Department of Archaeology at University College Dublin.
During 1953 further drainage work on the river resulted in another reduction of the water level, which revealed numerous cairns on both sides of the river below the outlet from Upper Lough Gara. Dr. Raftery was at that time engaged in excavating crannogs at Rathtinaun (SL047-021----) and Tivannagh (RO005-012003-), but undertook in his free time to supervise an instrument survey of these additional features, which were not expected to survive and which were not properly understood. This mapped survey, from which no artefacts were recovered, is known as the Forsyth survey after one the surveyors, whose name appears on one of the finished maps. It did not necessarily include a revisit of Raftery’s 1952 preliminary survey, and where it did a natural concordance does not always occur. The Forsyth survey is retained in the National Museum of Ireland.
The Raftery material was subsequently examined by Dr. C. Fredengren (2002 App. 1, 34, BOYL 066), who describes this feature (Raftery: No. 134) as a small possible platform cairn with one chert flake associated with it. It is depicted on the Forsyth survey possibly as a subrectangular island (dims c. 30m x c. 20m) with an altitude of 223.99 feet above the datum of Poolbeg Lighthouse. It is now an overgrown feature on the N bank of the Boyle River (Bing 2013).

Compiled by: Michael Moore

Date of revised upload: 10 November 2017

References

Fredengren, C. 2002 The crannogs of Lough Gara - a social history. Bray. Wordwell.

Cross, R.E. 1953 Lough Gara: a preliminary survey. Journal of the Royal Society of Antiquaries of Ireland 83, 93-6, 245-54.