Gormley: Viking settlement artefacts to remain buried

MANY secrets of one of the country’s most successful Viking communities are to remain buried after the Minister for the Environment decided on only limited excavation of the hidden settlement.

A plan for research at the 1,000-year-old Woodstown site outside Waterford city is to be drawn up, but Minister John Gormley accepted the recommendation of a working group that the area not be fully excavated.

Only a portion of the site, which was discovered during work on the Waterford city bypass in 2003, has been uncovered, and has yielded almost 6,000 artefacts, but it is not known how many more could remain.