House - Bronze Age, Barrees, Co. Cork

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House – Bronze Age, Barrees, Co. Cork

What looks from the surface like a low, unremarkable mound of earth and stone in Barrees, West Cork, turns out to be the carefully preserved footprint of a house that was already ancient when the Iron Age began.

Roughly circular in plan, measuring about six metres north to south and seven metres east to west, it sits quietly in the landscape with a slight depression off-centre to the east and traces of walling still visible at the south-east. For decades it was catalogued simply as a possible hut site, the kind of tentative classification that tends to stick until someone actually digs.

That happened in 2003, when archaeologist W. O'Brien excavated the site. What emerged was considerably more structured than the cautious original description had suggested. The house had a clear entrance on its eastern side leading into a circular room measuring roughly 2.35 metres by 2.15 metres, compact but purposefully built. On the western side of that room sat a horseshoe-shaped annexe containing a hearth, the kind of arrangement that speaks to daily domestic life, cooking, warmth, a household organised around a fire. Charcoal recovered from that hearth was radiocarbon dated to 2465 plus or minus 20 years before present, placing the structure firmly in the Late Bronze Age, a period in Ireland roughly spanning from around 1200 to 600 BC, when bronze tools were still in use and the island's communities were building in timber, earth, and stone. Conservation work was carried out on the site after excavation, stabilising what the dig had uncovered.

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