Best known as the presenter of UTV’s Lesser Spotted Ulster series, Mr Mahon joined the team from Queen’s University Belfast for the final stages of the excavation at the end of May. The dig was part of a three-year archaeological heritage programme, organised by the Community Archaeological Programme Northern Ireland (CAPNI) based at QUB. Advertisement Advertisement Did you know with an ad-lite subscription to NorthernIrelandWorld, you get 70% fewer ads while viewing the news that matters to you.
The aim of CAPNI, which was made possible thanks to a grant of more than £600,000 from The National Lottery Heritage Fund to the university’s Centre for Community Archaeology, is to engage the public with their local archaeological heritage. The latest excavation at Shaftesbury Park aimed to investigate a fort marked on an 1830s map of the area. While an earlier geophysical survey in March didn’t reveal any direct evidence of the outline of the fort itself, it did detect an ‘anomaly’ at the site that bore further investigation.
During the course of the dig, which ran over the last two weeks in May, a number of artefacts were unearthed, ranging from a prehistoric flint scraper to fragments of Victorian pottery. Advertisement Advertisement In a update on the QUB - Archaeology at Queen's Facebook page on June 3, the team behind the project confirmed that the dig had concluded, with both excavation trenches backfilled. “Unfortunately we didn't find evidence of the 'fort' b.