House - Bronze Age, Ballincurra, Co. Limerick
Co. Limerick |
Settlement Sites
A patch of ordinary pasture in County Limerick, lying between two small watercourses, contains the ghost of a Bronze Age building so small it barely qualifies as a house.
The structure, now fully excavated and invisible above ground, left behind nothing more than a shallow arc of gully cut into the soil, a ring-gully being the circular drainage or foundation trench that once ran around the base of a prehistoric structure. What makes this particular example quietly puzzling is its size: with an estimated internal diameter of around three metres and an enclosed area of roughly 9.5 square metres, it falls well below the typical dimensions of a Bronze Age round house, suggesting it may have been something more modest, perhaps a small outbuilding or a slot-trench designed to hold upright timber planking rather than the more familiar arrangement of wall posts. The single fragment of bone recovered from the gully is the only material trace of whoever, or whatever, occupied the space.
The site came to light in 2002 during topsoil-stripping for the Bord Gáis Éireann Pipeline to the West. Ken Wiggins, working under licence 02E0119, identified it as one of six features in the immediate area. Excavation followed that same year, carried out by Kate Taylor under licence 02E0470. She found two ring-gullies positioned just one metre apart. The western of the two had been partly destroyed by a modern field drain, leaving only an arc representing between one-third and one-half of a full circle. Its profile was shallow and irregular, ranging from 0.11 to 0.18 metres in depth and 0.25 to 0.4 metres in width. A possible entrance was tentatively identified at the north-east, where the gully became notably shallower, though the evidence was inconclusive. The site does not appear on any Ordnance Survey Ireland historic mapping, and an enclosure recorded separately lies roughly 90 metres to the west.
There is nothing to see at Ballincurra today. The monument has been fully excavated and leaves no surface trace, nor does it show up on aerial imagery. Its interest lies entirely in the archaeological record rather than in any physical remains a visitor might encounter. For those curious about the broader pipeline survey that brought it to light, the published summaries by Taylor (2004) and Grogan (2007) provide the most detailed accounts of what was found and what it might mean. The site is a reminder that the Irish landscape holds a great deal of prehistory that was only ever glimpsed in the moment of its destruction, recorded in notes and drawings before the ground closed over it again.