Archaeological treasures on sites along the N9/N10 route are being uncovered by teams of migrant workers, writes Rosita Boland.
In the remote townland of Holdenstown, Co Kilkenny, there is a container in a field of oats. It's been there for five weeks now; in another 11 weeks, it will be gone. Meanwhile, it's lunchtime and two Polish archaeologists are sitting on the floor of the container, eating sandwiches and drinking from a shared bottle of Coke, while all around them are cardboard boxes stacked with the remains of ancient skeletons, and a white plastic bucket starkly labelled "skull - very fragile".
This is one of the many sites currently being excavated along the route of the N9/N10, which will link Kilcullen to Waterford. Some 250 archaeologists are working on the project, which has been going on since 2001. At least half of them are Polish, with significant numbers of Lithuanian, Norwegian, Swedish and British, as well as Irish. In three years' time, when the road is built, the new dual-carriageway will slice across this farmer's land, bisecting the oat fields. It will run over the cemetery from which 30 skeletons between 900 and 1,500 years old have been removed, all buried in the Christian fashion, bodies aligned to face the rising sun in the east.
The eventual chosen route of the new road will be a balance of compromises to navigate the best way through the landscape. Factors to be considered include topography, ecological sites and existing farmlands and buildings. From the Knocktopher, Co Kilkenny stretch to the townland of Powerstown in Co Carlow alone, the new road will run through 100 townlands in both counties.
Ireland's earth contains a palimpsest of the past. Under the ground, all over the country, lie clues to the way our ancestors lived their lives. The most famous of these smaller found objects from the past are now in museums, while there are others which remain undiscovered, secreted within the soil. But along with the gold chalices, the Viking artefacts and the Oldcastle tombs, many humbler remains of simple vernacular have been excavated over time, such as the kilns, pits, fulachta fiadh (outdoor cooking sites) and foundations of Neolithic houses.
James Eogan, who is employed by the National Roads Authority, is senior archaeologist on the N9/N10 road scheme, and is overseeing the various teams that are working along the route. "We avoid all known sites of archaeological importance, such as castles, ring-forts and standing stones," he explains. Eogan himself is particularly interested in ditches that have been filled in over the centuries, and fulachta fiadh. "Waste can tell you so much about the way people lived; what they chose to throw away and what they kept. People have been dumping for hundreds, thousands of years. Looking at what they didn't want brings you into touch with the humanity of our forbears; with the vernacular life."
Before the various sections of the road are built, the chosen route is surveyed by teams of archaeologists, using a variety of methods, including aerial shots of the landscape. They also walk the fields through which the proposed route will go. Depending on what is found, the teams will then examine the site, and if it is in the direct path of the planned road, their findings will dictate whether the course of the road is altered, or whether the site is fully excavated.
This site in Holdenstown, where a cemetery lies under a barley field, also contains the remains of an eighth-century church and adjoining stone enclosure. The church itself, long ruined and then dismantled over the centuries, has tumbled in on itself, and become a kind of cairn over the years, as generations of farmers cleared stones from the fields by placing them at the site of the ruined church. Since the discovery of this site, the course of the road has been altered to avoid it.
Yvonne Whitly is the supervisor on this site, which has a team of 28 archaeologists working on it. Of those, 22 are Polish, with the others being Irish and Swedish. To work on an excavation you do not need an archaeological qualification, but do need to be patient, careful and observant of the soil texture. "Farmers often turn out to be the best archaeological workers," says Whitly. "They are so used to working with the soil."
On the Holdenstown site, Kacper Gasowski from Bialystok, close to the border with Belarus, has been in Ireland for seven months, working on excavations all that time. He finished his economics studies three years ago. "I heard through friends that there was archaeology work in Ireland," he explains. "It is a very interesting job, but I don't want to make it my career. But the money is good." Depending on experience, the pay differs, but according to Whitly, a weekly wage for an archaeological worker in Ireland starts at €400.
News of the many road-building projects in Ireland and the associated work on sites has spread through Europe. "We don't have the same extent of road-building in Poland, so there is not much work there," says Julia Glogowski from Warsaw. They all agree that the pay was the chief reason for their decision to come to Ireland, many of them on short-term contracts. Some of the archaeological workers are students, and come to work in Ireland for a few months to sustain them later in their studies. Friends pass on contacts, and there are well-known archaeology websites which advertise jobs.
At another nearby site, in Danesfort, work is winding down after four weeks. At this site, which adjoins the existing road between Kilkenny town and Stonyford, another team have found ditches, old field boundaries and a Neolithic rotary quern stone, used for grinding. Most workers are crouched down, intent on their digging, some with tiny plastic bags beside them, which contain little pieces of broken pottery and other items. If you close your eyes, all you can hear is the persistent sound of scraping.
This site was once inside the domain walls of Danesfort House, which was a large 17th-century estate. As well as the quern stone and adjoining kiln, where the cooking would have been done, the team have uncovered corners of what they think were 17th-century houses of those who worked on the estate and also a clearly delineated stone path, which would have been part of the estate's formal circular walk. None of it is very far from the surface of the earth, and it all looks startlingly easy to read, even for someone who knows very little about archaeology. The area beside the kiln, for instance, is far darker in colour than the rest of the earth in the field, coloured as it is by charcoal and organic remains of the food that would once have been prepared and cooked there.
There are 14 Polish people working on this site, with the remainder being mostly Irish. Andrzej Szlachta from Krakow, a farmer by trade, started working on excavations only a few years ago when a road was built near his farm in Poland. "We found some very unique glass bracelets and lots of pottery there: it was an old Celtic settlement."
It is Marek Wymazala's second year working in Ireland. From Bochnia, he has been working in archaeology since 2002, but came to Ireland because similar work was better paid here. "Physically, the work is the same, but the specifics are different. The soil is different here, harder to work, but you find the same kind of things."
When objects are found, they are taken to nearby site offices and logged. All objects removed from a dig are the property of the State. Logging the area where they were discovered is an integral part of the whole system of recovery: without a location and context, their meaning is often very unclear.
One of the Irish archaeological workers on the site is Máiread Kealy from Maddoxtown, Co Kilkenny. She originally trained as an art teacher and is a textile designer. This is her fourth year working on new road sites. "There's always a surprise when you are digging," she says. "This is the first medieval site I've worked on; the others have been early Christian and Bronze Age.
In a few years' time, this field and the oat field in Holdenstown will be part of a new, wider road: another layer of history added to the cross-section of our past.
