House - Bronze Age, Loughgur, Co. Limerick
Co. Limerick |
Settlement Sites
What survives of this Late Bronze Age shelter on the western slope of Knockadoon Peninsula is, by any measure, modest: a roughly semi-circular arrangement of stones, no more than 3.
35 metres across its widest internal dimension, set against a natural rock face that served as its eastern wall. The structure was never grand. Professor Seán P. Ó Ríordáin, who excavated it as Site G during an extraordinary eighteen-season campaign of fieldwork at Lough Gur, concluded that it was probably occupied for only a brief period, a temporary shelter rather than a permanent dwelling. What makes it quietly absorbing is not its scale but its legibility: the trampled clay floor, the post-holes cut directly into the bedrock, the two large entrance stones still describing a gap roughly 91 centimetres wide facing north. Someone slept here, or sheltered here, and left enough behind to make that plain.
Ó Ríordáin's excavations, published in 1954, recorded the construction in careful detail. The walls, between 31 and 61 centimetres high, were built by piling large and small stones together without regularity, the technique of people working quickly with what the landscape offered. The cliff face rose vertically behind the structure to a combined height of around 1.83 metres, with a shelf partway up, and five post-holes had been cut or packed into the rock to support a timber superstructure above the low stone footings. Bones and charcoal were found within the wall material itself, worked in with the building rubble. Pottery sherds recovered from the site, identified as Class II flat-bottomed pots, point to a Late Bronze Age date, placing the structure roughly in the period between 1200 and 600 BC. The site sits within one of the most densely layered archaeological landscapes in Ireland, with Neolithic and Bronze Age remains crowding the peninsula on almost every side: a semi-circular enclosure called Seeaghanmnatee lies 55 metres to the west, another excavated site is 50 metres to the south-west, and Circle K is 80 metres to the east.
The site is on the west-facing slope of Knockadoon Peninsula, overlooking Garrett Island on Lough Gur, roughly 176 metres south-east of the island's position on the water. Lough Gur is well signposted from the main road between Limerick and Kilmallock, and the peninsula itself is accessible on foot. The excavated walls are not visible on aerial imagery and the site does not appear on Ordnance Survey maps, so visitors are unlikely to stumble across it without prior research. The area repays slow walking: the concentration of sites means that almost any direction from this spot leads to something else worth pausing over.