House - early medieval, Bray, Co. Kerry

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House

House – early medieval, Bray, Co. Kerry

On the south-east-facing slopes of Bray Head on Valentia Island, the remains of an early medieval house were uncovered that preserve, in quiet detail, the logic of a life lived inside a circle of stone.

The house is small by any measure, roughly seven metres across, yet the excavated evidence speaks to a surprisingly organised domestic arrangement: a hearth placed east of centre, drainage channels running in careful north-south lines across the interior floor, and a flagstone path leading away from the probable doorway toward the east. A short L-shaped cluster of stake-holes near the interior wall may mark where a bench or sleeping area once stood. Even the ash from the hearth had drifted over the capstones of a souterrain built into the northern portion of the floor, a souterrain being an underground stone-lined passage, typically used for storage or refuge, that appears with some regularity in early medieval Irish settlements.

Excavations carried out in 2000 by Hayden revealed the structural bones of the house in some detail. The drystone wall, built without mortar and surviving to about 1.2 metres in height, had been cut into the upslope along its northern arc, which is why that section survived best while little remained of the southern wall. A ring of post-holes set roughly a metre inside the northern wall points to an internal timber ring that would have helped carry the roof. The hearth itself, about a metre wide and shallowly scooped into the ground, contained small stake-holes that may have held a spit above the fire. Drainage was handled with some care: two channels ran from the northern wall across the western half of the floor and fed into three stone-capped drains, with a smaller flagstone-roofed drain likely running beneath the doorway threshold. At some later point, a second house was built immediately to the north, partly overlapping the original northern wall, suggesting the spot remained in use across more than one phase of occupation.

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