Habitation site, Kilbride, Co. Wicklow

Co. Wicklow |

Settlement Sites

Habitation site, Kilbride, Co. Wicklow

Beneath the route of the Arklow bypass in County Wicklow, a Bronze Age settlement once occupied a patch of ground that road engineers would eventually slice through.

What the construction work inadvertently exposed was the ghost of a building, legible only as a ring of postholes in the soil, the timbers themselves long gone, leaving behind the voids where they once stood.

Archaeologist Thaddeus Breen excavated the site under licence reference 97E0324 as part of the standard monitoring that accompanies major road schemes in Ireland. The postholes traced an oval structure roughly 7.5 metres in diameter, a modest but coherent footprint that would have supported a timber or post-and-wattle dwelling. Scattered around it were further postholes that formed no clear pattern, perhaps the remains of outbuildings, animal pens, or earlier phases of activity that no longer read as a plan. No hearth was identified, though the site had been heavily truncated, meaning that later ploughing, erosion, or groundworks had already removed much of the upper stratigraphy before any archaeologist arrived. What survived was enough, however, to suggest habitation rather than a purely agricultural or ritual use. Fragments of pottery provided the clearest dating evidence: sherds from Beaker vessels, Cordoned Urns, and Vase vessels, all types associated with the Bronze Age, spanning roughly 2500 to 600 BC. Beaker pottery in particular is often associated with the earlier part of this period and tends to appear at sites where people were eating, drinking, and going about domestic life. Alongside the pottery, excavators found struck flakes of flint, noted as being of poor quality, a small detail that points to people making do with whatever stone was locally available rather than importing finer material from elsewhere.

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