House - Bronze Age, Mitchelstown, Co. Cork

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Settlement Sites

House – Bronze Age, Mitchelstown, Co. Cork

Beneath what is now a road in Mitchelstown, Co. Cork, the remains of a Bronze Age house lay undisturbed for more than three thousand years, until a road-building project inadvertently ensured its discovery.

Excavated in 2004 ahead of construction of the Mitchelstown inner relief road, this structure is the oldest of three Bronze Age houses found clustered together on the same ground, each overlapping and cutting into the others across time, like pages pressed together in a book.

The house was roughly oval in plan, measuring 10.8 metres north to south and 9.6 metres east to west, a substantial size for a domestic structure of the period. What archaeologists uncovered was a ring of eleven post-holes, the underground ghosts of the upright timbers that once formed the walls. A slot-trench, a narrow foundation channel sometimes used to anchor wall planking or wattling at ground level, was not found, though it may have been destroyed when the two later houses were built on the same spot. Near the centre of the floor, a hearth survived as a large pit filled with ash, the kind of central fireplace typical of round or oval prehistoric houses, providing warmth and light and probably a focus for daily domestic life. The entrance, just under a metre wide, faced east. Charcoal recovered from the hearth pit was radiocarbon dated and returned results placing the house's use somewhere between 1419 and 1213 cal. BC, firmly in the Middle Bronze Age. A dense cluster of stake-holes in the area where all three houses overlapped suggests that even earlier, more temporary activity may have taken place on this spot before any of the permanent structures were raised.

Nothing marks the site today; the relief road now runs over it. The value here is less in visiting than in the knowledge that an ordinary family's house, with its fire, its eastward-facing door, and its ring of wooden posts, once stood in this now-unremarkable corner of north Cork.

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