House - Bronze Age, Danesfort, Co. Kilkenny
Co. Kilkenny |
Settlement Sites
Beneath a field in Danesfort, Co. Kilkenny, three Bronze Age households once stood within easy walking distance of one another on a gentle north-facing slope.
They were invisible for thousands of years until a road scheme stripped back the topsoil and exposed their outlines in 2007, revealing the kind of ordinary domestic arrangement that rarely survives in the archaeological record precisely because it was so ordinary.
The excavation was carried out in advance of improvements to the N9/N10 Kilcullen to Waterford road corridor, and what emerged was a circular structure measuring roughly 6.8 by 9.5 metres, defined by ten shallow post-holes set at two-metre intervals around the perimeter, with a second internal ring of five post-holes suggesting a more complex roof structure than a simple single-span frame. Post-holes are all that remain of the upright timbers that once held a building together; their spacing and depth allow archaeologists to reconstruct the likely size and shape of the walls and roof. Projecting from the south-east side was a porch, about four metres long and two and a half metres wide, made up of eleven posts of varying dimensions. Inside, an oval hearth sat slightly off-centre, flanked by two pits, one on each side. Most intriguing are two tight clusters of stake-holes on either side of the hearth, interpreted as the remains of a spit, suggesting that meat was being roasted directly over the fire in a fairly deliberate, structured way. Two further houses of closely comparable construction were found roughly twenty and fifty metres to the south and south-west, hinting at a small Bronze Age settlement rather than an isolated farmstead.
The site itself lies in rolling agricultural land and is no longer visible at ground level; the road improvement works that uncovered it have long since been completed. What remains is the published record of the excavation by Devine and Zimny, which documents the structural detail with enough precision to make the households feel genuinely legible, three buildings, three hearths, and the faint ghost of a spit turning above a fire several thousand years ago.