The Woodstown Viking site in Waterford is “one of the best-surveyed sites in all of Ireland” Waterford City and County Council heard at the recent Metropolitan council meeting.
The Viking site at Woodstown, on the southern bank of the River Suir, just 10km upriver from the city of Waterford was discovered in 2003 in advance of the construction of the N25 Waterford city bypass.
Archaeologist Neil Jackman made a presentation about the progress of the project at Woodstown Viking site.
“The surveys have revealed an awful lot of information,” he said and historians are working through the thousands of archeological finds that have come from the dig site.
There is work ongoing, the council heard, to establish how the historical finds from the site “can best benefit the people of Waterford as well as the academic and archeological community.”
The report “offers a very long-term vision of the site, and it follows and references successful international sites in places like the UK, France and Scandinavia.”
The key challenge, the Council heard, “is to make the intangible, tangible.”
The challenge is to turn a “bunch of largely empty green fields, over near the Waterford Greenway” into something, which “can get across how important that place was.”
He said that “with support, Woodstown could become the key defining attraction on the Waterford Greenway - it’s an internationally significant tourism site as well as an important place for education and social inclusion.”
A number of the finds are on display in Reginald’s Tower in Waterford City. Based on the findings from the site, a book ‘Woodstown: A Viking-Age Settlement in Co Waterford’ was written by the historians investigating the site. However, many of the findings at the site have made their way out of the south east and council members questioned the benefits that people in Waterford were seeing from the site.
“We’ve been at the Woodstown site for over 20 years; as archeologists you might have a different perspective on it, but the general public is wondering, for what is regarded as a national monument, there hasn’t really been much benefit to Waterford,” one councillor said.
“Most of the artefacts you’ve found there have gone away from Waterford. We as a city, really haven’t seen much of a bounce from it,” they said, pushing for the development of an interpretive centre near Mount Congreve to generate the most tourist interest from the site.
