Drumclay Crannog was the site of one of the most important archaeological excavations that have happened in Northern Ireland and within these Islands for perhaps a generation or more. The excavation focused on a lakeside settlement, a site known as a crannog, but really what we found in the course of that excavation was a really, really big site that had been very well preserved within the wetland environment.

The archaeological excavation lasted for around about a year. It started in June of 2012 and it lasted throughout that summer, winter and into the following spring.

The archaeologists uncovered a whole series of things about life in the past, about a community that had once lived at Drumclay, for a period of maybe up to 1000 years, probably from sometime around the 7th century. That covered everything from the very, very ordinary, but because it was a wetland site it survived - things like the combs, the toys, the wooden implements that were used for everyday life. Right the way through to things that were really very special and that included artefacts like the stick pins, the ornament pins and a little piece of gold.

In addition to the artefacts, the structures are really important at that site because they show a development of architectural styles over a really long period of time. It wasn’t just a case of one house that had been replaced on top of an earlier house, on top of an earlier house. This covered a really large area possibly with satellite crannogs on either side of it, which really suggests that there was a community living there, several houses at any one time. There were very clearly the remains of at least 30 that turned up during the excavation, going back right the way through this enormous time depth. But also within that there was evidence of where there had been other structures and occasional features that might or mightn’t be part of other buildings. Those of course were only the ones that had survived. These things were being replaced and rebuilt. One of the really telling features were the hearths that were excavated by the guys on the site. The hearths were an incredible layer upon layer upon layer of burnt material and clays and contained some really special artefacts. The hearths always seemed to be in the centre of the houses. The way that we think they were being used is that they were being restored each time the house was re-built. If the layers in the hearths are anything to go by, they would really suggest many, many more houses that we’ve only got some of the evidence for in the structures.

The excavation is almost the easy bit. Making sense of what’s been dug up is a challenge. We have already made inroads into some of the post excavation work and that’s in terms of getting the basic site information gathered together. We have been conducting some further conservation of the small finds.

My hope for the future is that we really get into that material to process it, Process is a very clinical way of saying we need to really find out what’s inside of it. So to do the small finds analysis, we’ve got them stabilised - now what are they, how do they connect to elsewhere? To do the environmental analysis of the materials coming from that site and to place this site in its environmental context - how it fitted into the world around it.

In the excavation at Drumclay we had a major site with really, really important remains within it that could be investigated thoroughly for the first time in over a century. The remains that we have that have come up from the site really are special and newly discovered, which means we now have for the island of Ireland a whole resource of information about this region from this one site that can then be used to connect it to many other sites across the island, across the these islands and then further afield.