History lecture on Toar Bog, Tyrrellspass

The next lecture hosted by Westmeath Archaeological and Historical Society is on Wednesday January 28 in the Greville Arms Hotel at 8pm. The speaker is the well known archaeologist Michael Stanley, who will discuss the excavations he oversaw on Toar Bog some 25 years ago. Several important finds were unearthed and Michael will describe their significance.

Dispatches from the debris fields: the late prehistoric and early medieval archaeology of Toar Bog, Tyrrellspass. Toar Bog, County Westmeath, just south of Tyrrellspass, first came to archaeological attention in 1946 when the peat there yielded a stone axehead to turfcutters.

Further artefact discoveries were made in the ensuing decades – a bronze spearhead, a wooden scoop, and a bronze dirk – but the true scale of the archaeology therein would not be exposed until Bord na Móna began industrial peat extraction in the 1980s.

In the summer of 2000, the Irish Archaeological Wetland Unit (IAWU) of University College Dublin conducted a survey of Toar Bog on behalf of Dúchas, the Heritage Service, which identified hundreds of previously undocumented wooden structures and deposits and led to the excavation of a unique Iron Age wooden vessel.

Those findings, and those of subsequent excavations in 2005–6 and 2014, have resulted in a rich archive of information that warrants further detailed study.

This lecture seeks to illuminate the ongoing value of this legacy survey data in the light of the excavation evidence and recent spatial analysis, and calls for wider publication of the results of archaeological investigations in Bord na Móna bogs.