A REPORT identifying part of controversially rezoned land in Blessington, Co Wicklow as an important Viking site is being considered by officials from the Department of Arts, Culture and the Gaeltacht.
The Labour TD for Wicklow, Mr Liam Kavanagh, said yesterday that the Minister, Mr Higgins, was entitled to intervene to prevent work on gravel pits going ahead in Glen Ding Woods and that the report's findings should be given strong consideration.
A Labour councillor, Mr Thomas Cullen, a former chairman of Wicklow County Council, said Mr Higgins had only five weeks in which to act before the decision on planning permission was taken.
He demanded to know why the Office of Public Works (OPW) had given the Department of Energy clearance to sell the land in 1991, two years after a separate archaeological study.
"The Minister will now have to consider a temporary preservation order on these lands before the bulldozers move in," said Mr Cullen.
A spokesman for the Department of Arts, Culture and the Gaeltacht said the fresh study, which called for a major archaeological assessment of the land at Glen Ding Woods before work on the gravel pits began, was being considered by the National Monuments and Historical Properties Service.
Last September Wicklow County Council rezoned 147 acres of land in its Blessington Draft Development Plan to enable Roadstone, the construction company which was sold the site for £1 million, to extract gravel and sand.
Roadstone has said that if the 90 acres it requires is rezoned, the remaining 57 acres will remain untouched.
Dr Eoin Grogan, of the Archaeological Discovery Programme, undertook his fresh study in November last year after an application by Roadstone to extend its proposed development of Glen Ding.
Rathturtle Moat had been pinpointed by Dr Grogan seven years earlier as an area of great historical significance during a classification by the OPW of all archaeological sites in the Wicklow region.
He has since detailed the remaining archaeological sites within Glen Ding in a report to the Minister.
Rathturtle Moat stands at the south-western end of the ridge in Glen Ding and is owned and protected by the OPW. A manor and estate was laid out on the site in the 17th century and given to Archbishop Michael Boyle of Armagh by King Charles II.
The grandiose estate included a walled deer park, but other earthworks and banks indicate that the area may date back to the late Bronze Age and could be linked to the Viking MacTorcaill family, once Kings of Dublin.
"Very few sites like this have historical documentation, as the deer park does, and most of them date to the 18th century and are not afforded any automatic protection," said Dr Grogan, director of the North Munster Project of the Discovery Programme.
"Certainly I think that at the very least there should be a thorough archaeological examinations before any construction is allowed to proceed. Glen Ding itself was the only natural access from the Midlands and Kildare into this part of Wicklow and was of very important strategic significance.
"The reference to Rathturtle suggests that they had a Viking stronghold here, not just into the valley, but the major north-south roadway through west Wicklow."