Structure, Curraghatoor, Co. Tipperary

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Utility Structures

Structure, Curraghatoor, Co. Tipperary

Beneath a gently sloping pasture field at Curraghatoor in County Tipperary lies the remnant of a wooden barrier built sometime between 921 and 828 BC, a date arrived at by radiocarbon analysis of material recovered from its foundation trench.

What survives is not a wall or a building in any conventional sense but the ghost of a palisade, a defensive or enclosing fence of upright timber stakes and posts, recorded as a linear trench running roughly northwest to southeast for approximately 6.2 metres. Around thirty contiguous stake- and post-holes were identified along the base of the trench, set in a single line, with some evidence that individual uprights were replaced over time, suggesting the structure was maintained and used across a period rather than simply raised and abandoned.

The excavation, carried out by Doody and published in 2007, placed this palisade within a wider landscape of prehistoric activity that makes Curraghatoor quietly remarkable. The Later Bronze Age trench was cut after the Bronze Age houses found nearby, the closest of which stood just two metres to the west and another roughly three metres to the north. More striking still, the foundation trench slices directly across the eastern wall of a Neolithic house lying immediately to the west, meaning that when the people of the Later Bronze Age drove their posts into the ground here, they were unknowingly, or perhaps knowingly, disturbing the footprint of a dwelling that had stood perhaps two thousand years before their own time. That layering, one period cutting through another, is a reminder that this unremarkable-looking pasture was returned to again and again over millennia, each generation settling into a landscape already shaped by those who came before.

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Pete F
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