The town of Ardreigh survived for centuries before disappearing, but what happened to this ancient Irish settlement?
A view of the plains of South Kildare. The area where the town of Ardreigh once stood now resembles this, with little evidence of a settlement having existed at all.
Sarah777 / Public domain
Bad sections of roads are common in Ireland, and one of the most notorious bad bends was for many years located just outside of the midlands town of Athy. A part of the regional road R417, leading southwards out of the town in the direction of its larger neighbour Carlow, was classified as an accident "black spot" because of an extremely precarious bend that resulted in numerous car crashes, both minor and otherwise. The road needed realignment and, with the dramatic increase in traffic witnessed in Ireland at the turn of the 21st-century, it was becoming urgent.
Kildare County Council--the local authority responsible for such works--was nonetheless aware that the Ardreigh area was of potential interest to archaeologists. A study had been commissioned in 1999 which examined countless historical documents, records of previous archaeological assessments, and even aerial photographs of the area. Based on this study, permission for preliminary archaeological digs was given before the roadworks commenced. What was discovered at Ardreigh was astonishing: thousands of artefacts and human remains, evidence of continuous settlement from approximately 7000 BC right up to the late middle ages. Despite such a long and illustrious past, however, there is practically nothing left to be seen above the ground. Which leads us to the question: what happened to the town of Ardreigh?
When the first inhabitants of the island of Ireland arrived during the Mesolithic period, they encountered a landscape that was drastically different from today's. The topography of modern Ireland is characterised by bucolic scenes of gently-rolling hills and stone-walled fields populated by grazing sheep and cattle. Less than 3% of the island is classed as woodland. By contrast, the first settlers were confronted with an almost impenetrable frontier of dense forest when they started to cross--most likely from the European mainland and not Britain, as has been historically presumed--after the end of the last ice age, probably starting from around 10 000 BC. With limited means of clearing woodland, and with animals such as the now extinct Irish species of wolves and bears to contend with in the forests, the colonists resorted to using natural waterways to migrate inland.
If we assume that these settlers arrived from the continent, perhaps from modern-day Spain or Portugal, then it is likely that they made landfall along the southern coast. In that case, the rivers known as the three sisters--the Barrow, the Nore and the Siur--were probably among the first to carry subsequent waves of migrants away from the coast and into the Irish midlands. These pioneers would most likely have settled at various points along the rivers, exploiting the resources of the waterways to supplement whatever food they found by hunting and gathering. Stone tools from this period were unearthed in the excavation at Ardreigh, suggesting that middle-stone age migrants had made the 66 KM journey upriver from the tidal limit of the Barrow and forming a settlement less than 200 metres away from a natural bend in the river's course.
The River Barrow. Early settlers would have navigated Ireland's rivers upstream from the coast, and it is likely that Ardreigh was one of the earliest inland settlements.
Artur KozioĊ / CC BY-SA (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)
And the excavations revealed that the area had been continuously inhabited from that point on, through all the subsequent phases of the country's historical development. Flint tools and evidence of dwellings similar to the log cabins of North America were dated to the Neolithic, when the inhabitants of the area started to clear woodland for the first time in order to grow their own crops. The cremated remains of a middle-aged man were found in a ceramic urn and dated to the Bronze Age, circa 1100 BC. Evidence of medieval settlement includes an early Christian church from around 500 AD, and the town of Ardreigh showed signs of continued growth from that point all the way to the arrival of the Anglo-Normans, who took control of the area after the invasion of 1169. That led to Ardreigh's real heyday--the town after that point is believed to have been impressive by the standards of the Irish middle ages, featuring a large church and a busy main thoroughfare lined by houses, shops and workshops.
The other significant find in the excavation was human remains. More skeletons were unearthed at the Ardreigh site than at any other archaeological site in the country--a total of 1259. The individuals buried at Ardreigh included those from all social backgrounds, and radiocarbon dating established that burials had started in the town's cemetery in the 7th- or 8th-century, reached a peak in the 13th- and 14th-centuries, and petered out by the late 16th. By that point more or less all the inhabitants of the town had left and migrated elsewhere, leaving what remained of the settlement's buildings to sink into the ground. The area became part of south Kildare's pasture farmland, and no visible sign of the once bustling town was to be seen until a road needed realignment more than four centuries later.
A human skeleton. The excavation at Ardreigh unearthed more skeletal remains than any other archaeological dig in Ireland.
Davidbena / CC BY-SA (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0)
A clue as to why this happened may have been revealed by an anomaly in the nature of the burial sites excavated during the dig. Most of the bodies that were laid to rest there were interred carefully, placed on their backs in their burial shrouds and aligned along an east-west axis. A small number of individuals were buried hastily, however, with little of the dignity and ceremony afforded to others. And when radiocarbon dating established that they had died at some point in the 14th-century, that started to make a great deal of sense. In the 1300s the Black Death swept through Europe, and according to some estimates claimed the lives of up to 60% of the continent's population.
Initially spread to humans by rats--or, more accurately, by the fleas that preyed upon both rats and humans--the bubonic plague quickly spread along Europe's trade networks. Urban settlements were the most badly affected, and there is evidence that the virus spread rapidly on the island of Ireland along the same waterways that had first led settlers to the site of Ardreigh thousands of years before. Large, important cities and towns, such as Kilkenny and New Ross, suffered devastating casualties in the first wave of infection and arguably never recovered. Kilkenny, for example, was a major socio-economic centre for the Anglo-Normans and was in fact once their capital on the island; as of today, its population stands at 26 512--small even by Irish standards. New Ross, once the largest port in the eastern province of Leinster, now has 8 040 inhabitants. This pattern of population decimation was replicated across all of the urban Norman strongholds in Ireland in the 14th-century.
And that disaster would soon be compounded by a resurgence of Gaelic Irish strength in the wake of the plague. Pushed out of the more arable areas in the east and south of the country, the Gaelic Irish had been forced onto the harsher uplands after the invasion of the 1100s. More isolated from large settlements, and living further away from major rivers and tributaries, they suffered a great deal less during the Black Death than their Anglo-Norman counterparts. And they started to take advantage of this fact in the latter half of the 14th-century, conducting frequent raids on towns and cities and gradually pushing back against the influence of the Norman lords and their colonists. Ardreigh, situated in a valley in the richly fertile agricultural lands of south Kildare, and flush with relative wealth, must have proved an enticing prospect for marauding Gaelic forces. Continuous attacks and unrest from the late 1300s on undoubtedly contributed greatly to the decline of the town, and perhaps its eventual abandonment.
An oil painting of a scene during the Black Death. Hastily buried corpses in the excavated cemetery at Ardreigh suggest that the town was stricken by the plague, as were most other urban settlements.
Rita Greer / FAL
Ardreigh's remains now lay within the area of the the town of Athy, which it both traded with and rivalled in the medieval period. The Black Death took its toll on this Anglo-Norman settlement too, but Athy had the advantage of having large defensive walls which were used to protect its status as a major fording point on the route from Dublin to Kilkenny. These almost certainly helped the town to survive the Gaelic Irish incursions which devastated other urban areas in the period.
But they may also have been used for something considerably darker. Years before the excavation at Ardreigh, a schoolteacher once remarked to an individual from the town that during the first outbreak of bubonic plague in the area, the townspeople of Athy heard that there were cases in the neighbouring town of Ardreigh. Fearing the spread of the disease, they closed their southern gate and left Ardreigh to its fate. Though unverified, the fact that this rumour even existed speaks volumes about the behaviour of human populations when their existence is threatened, and how even our closest neighbours can become expendable in the face of seemingly unstoppable infection. In the context of what we have seen in 2020, the very possibility that this took place is as significant--and disturbing--as ever.
The old town hall in Athy, whose townlands now incorporate the area of Ardreigh.
Eeno11 / CC BY (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0)
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