House - Bronze Age, Coonagh West, Co. Limerick
Co. Limerick |
Settlement Sites
On a low glacial ridge above a Shannon floodplain in Coonagh West, County Limerick, a small Bronze Age house once stood facing south or south-east, its entrance perhaps sheltered by a porch, its interior no wider than a generous garden shed.
What survives today is nothing visible at ground level; the structure was uncovered, recorded, and then built over during road construction. Yet the traces that archaeologists found in the earth, a curving foundation trench, two post-holes, dark silt laced with charcoal, were enough to reconstruct the outline of a domestic life lived somewhere between 1745 and 1541 BC.
The house, designated Structure 315 by excavator Kate Taylor under licence E2091, was investigated as part of the Southern Limerick Ring Road Phase II works, published by Bermingham and others in 2013. The partial remains consisted of a sub-circular gully, a foundation trench into which the base of a wall structure would have been set, of which 6.50 metres survived, running to a probable internal diameter of between 3.8 and 4.2 metres. Two post-holes near the entrance were consistent with a doorway, possibly with a projecting porch. Radiocarbon dates from ash charcoal retrieved from a post-hole and from the gully itself placed the building at the transition between the Early and Middle Bronze Age. The finds were telling in their ordinariness: fragments of domestic pottery, vitrified hearth lining (the fused residue of a repeatedly fired clay surface), a worked stone object, oak charcoal, and a type D tanged arrowhead of Early Bronze Age form. Eight metres to the north-west lay the footprint of a second Bronze Age house, and within twenty metres the team also excavated two fulachta fia, the burnt mound sites associated with outdoor cooking or industrial heating that are among the most commonly found prehistoric monuments in Ireland. A trackway contemporary with the house connected the settlement cluster to the wider landscape.
Because the site was fully excavated ahead of road development, there is nothing to see on the ground today. Its significance lies in the published record rather than in any surviving physical presence. Researchers and those curious about Bronze Age settlement in the Shannon basin will find the detailed stratigraphic and finds data in Taylor and Ruttle (2013), while the site entries compiled by Edmond O'Donovan remain accessible through the Archaeological Survey of Ireland database. The location, on a well-drained ridge above flood-prone ground close to a major river, is itself instructive: it follows precisely the kind of topographic logic that Bronze Age communities across Ireland applied when choosing where to build, close to water and movement corridors, but safely above the seasonal inundation of the plain.