House - Bronze Age, Curraghatoor, Co. Tipperary
Co. Tipperary |
Settlement Sites
A field of ordinary-looking pasture in County Tipperary conceals, entirely without drama, the remains of a Bronze Age house that has not been visible above ground for thousands of years.
Its existence was first confirmed not by a chance find or a farmer's spade but by cropmarks picked up in an aerial photograph taken in May 1977, the kind of ghostly impression that appears when buried foundations cause subtle differences in how grass or grain grows overhead. What lies beneath is a circular structure roughly five metres in diameter, modest even by the standards of its era, and long since swallowed by the landscape around it.
Excavations carried out between 1987 and 1991 under excavation number E00455, and published by Doody in 2007, revealed the house in considerable detail, though not completely. Only the southern and eastern portions of the structure survived, the rest having been destroyed when a later house was built directly over it, one occupation literally erasing part of another. What remained was defined by foundation trenches, the shallow channels cut into the ground to seat timber uprights, along with associated stake-holes and post-holes. A probable entrance about a metre wide was identified on the eastern side. Inside, excavators found a shallow hearth positioned slightly off-centre, with a cluster of stake-holes along its western edge and two post-holes on the southern side, an arrangement interpreted as possibly supporting a spit above the fire. Other post-holes were recorded inside the structure as well, though their purpose remains uncertain. The house was not alone: three further Bronze Age houses were identified within a few metres to the north, north-east, and south, suggesting this was once a small cluster of dwellings on a gently southward-sloping piece of ground, part of a settled community whose everyday life has otherwise left almost no trace on the surface at all.
