NEXT TIME a set of gleaming alloys or slick Pirelli tyres catches your eye, spare a thought for our ancestors. To get themselves rolling, they had to get creative with a tree and an axe, writes CLAIRE O'CONNELL
We don’t know much about prehistoric vehicles here, but archaeological digs for new road developments have been rolling back the years, offering clues about how people travelled from A to B in the old days.
One excavation in particular – carried out in 2006 ahead of building the Dromod-Roosky bypass on the N4 – revealed a network of wooden trackways and platforms criss-crossing through an area of bog.
The trackways date from around 3,600BC up to 800AD, explains consultant archaeologist Caitríona Moore, a director on the dig that summer at Edercloon, Co Longford, for the Cultural Resource Development Services. “It was in a little area of reclaimed raised bog along the side of the former N4,” she recalls. “Just underneath the grass was intact bog, which has high water-levels and low oxygen, so the trackways were very well preserved.”
The wooden structures, which were built through the Stone, Bronze and Iron Ages and into to the early Christian period, would have allowed pedestrian access into the bog, possibly to find food and plants, explains Moore.
Further clues came from the objects left at the base of the trackways – including bits of wooden bowls, spears, wheels, axe handles and parts of a cart.
Was this an early example of fly-tipping? Probably not, says Moore. The artefacts cropped up fairly regularly along the tracks, suggesting they were part of a ritual or superstition.
But whether it was rubbish or offerings, what the archaeologists discovered offers a rare glimpse into vehicular transport of the time.
One of the most outstanding finds was a portion of a large wheel in a trackway dating from around 1100BC (late Bronze Age) making it the oldest known wheel in Ireland, says Moore.
“We found the partial remains of a block wheel, a very early type of wheel made of three pieces of wood. The two outer pieces are C-shaped bits of wood and between them would be a rectangular piece of wood, then the three pieces would be joined together with dowels,” she explains.
But the ancient wheel, which would have been about 1.5 metres in diameter and is covered in tool marks indicative of a Bronze Age axe, doesn’t ever seem to have been used.
“It looks like when it was being made that there was a miscalculation and there wasn’t enough wood to finish the outer part of the wheel so it just got discarded,” says Moore.
So what might the wheel have been used for? “That’s a big question, because there’s very little evidence for vehicles in Ireland from that time. There are texts that describe Celtic chariots, but we have very few physical remains,” says Moore.
“But with a thick and heavy block wheel like that, you are probably not talking about something light like a chariot, but a fairly large and sturdy utilitarian vehicle like a cart.”
The Edercloon dig also turned up two newer, more unusual wheel structures – parts of wooden “tyres” left in separate trackways built almost 1,000 years apart. Based on the fragments, Chiara Chirotti digitally reconstructed the rest of the wheels to figure out how they may originally have looked.
“There’s a small piece of curved wood, and in the inner part of it there’s a carved recess or groove that runs lengthways where there are still dowels in place from where it was attached to something else.
“We think it was a wooden tyre on a light disc wheel. And, bizarrely, there’s no parallel for these – I haven’t been able to find this type of wheel in use in Ireland or anywhere else.”
The finds at Edercloon are now in conservation with the National Museum, and the area probably houses plenty more treasures outside the 40-metre wide dig site, says Moore. “Some of the trackways were very big and it’s likely they would have run several hundred metres outside the excavation area.”
The hinterland will keep its secrets for now – she knows of no plans to investigate it further. “There is undoubtedly some great archaeology outside the area we excavated, but it’s sub-surface, so not uncovered unless someone has a reason to. And wetland archaeology in particular is expensive because you find so much stuff that needs preservation.”
Caitríona Moore speaks at this year’s NRA National Archaeology Seminar “Creative Minds: production, manufacturing and invention in ancient Ireland”, tomorrow, August 27th, at the Gresham Hotel in Dublin. Booking is essential for the free event. Call Lillian Butler at 01-660 2511 or e-mail lbutler@nra.ie