House - 16th century, Kilmallock, Co. Limerick

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House

House – 16th century, Kilmallock, Co. Limerick

In Kilmallock, a sixteenth-century house carries a peculiarity that most passers-by would never guess: one of its walls is not its own.

The northern boundary of the building's backyard is formed by the standing remnant of an earlier medieval structure, a wall that pre-dates the house itself and has simply been absorbed into the fabric of later occupation. The building sits to the south-east of King's Castle, the tower house that projects visibly into Kilmallock's main street, and the whole area amounts to a layered accumulation of medieval life, one period quietly pressing against another.

In advance of a proposed renovation and extension of the building, archaeological testing was carried out by Linda G. Lynch under licence No. 06E0266. Three trenches were opened across the site, excavated by machine and then cleaned by hand, the standard approach when archaeologists need to establish whether significant deposits survive and at what depth they begin. Two of the trenches, numbered 1 and 3, produced an archaeologically sealed layer at roughly 0.6 metres below the existing ground surface. A sealed layer is significant because it has remained undisturbed since it was laid down, meaning the material within it reflects a particular moment in time rather than a mixture of later interference. Pottery recovered from this depth was identified as late medieval or post-medieval in character, and the excavators noted that still earlier material likely survives beneath it. The third trench told a different story: the deposits there had been disturbed, probably during the construction of later drainage works, and nothing of archaeological significance remained intact.

Kilmallock itself rewards slow attention. The town retains a remarkable concentration of medieval fabric, including a Dominican friary, a collegiate church, and sections of the town wall, so the context for a find like this is unusually legible. The house in question is not a public site, and the testing was carried out in advance of private development rather than as part of an open excavation. For anyone interested in the archaeology of the area, the results are published on excavations.ie, where Lynch's report sits alongside the broader record of investigation in one of Munster's most thoroughly documented medieval towns.

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