House - early medieval, Lusk, Co. Dublin
Co. Dublin |
House
Before a housing estate was built on the edge of Lusk in north County Dublin, archaeologists had a brief window to record what lay beneath the soil, and what they found was the ground plan of a house that had not been entered in well over a thousand years.
The structure is oval, roughly eleven metres across, with an entrance oriented to the south-east, a detail that recurs often in early medieval Irish domestic buildings and likely reflects a preference for shelter from prevailing westerly winds as much as any symbolic concern. It is the kind of find that rarely survives long enough to be visited, because the very process that revealed it, a pre-development excavation, was also the last chapter of its physical existence.
The house sat inside a ringfort, the term for a circular enclosed farmstead of the early medieval period, typically defined by one or more earthen banks and ditches and representing the standard unit of rural settlement in Ireland between roughly the fifth and twelfth centuries. This particular enclosure, recorded in the national monuments register as DU008-103001, contained at least two structures within its interior, of which this was one. The excavation was carried out under licence number 05E0848, and the findings were later published by Giacometti in 2011. Lusk itself had significant early ecclesiastical importance in the same period, which gives the surrounding landscape an added layer of context, though the house itself speaks more plainly to the ordinary agricultural life that filled out the centuries around the better-documented monastic activity nearby.
There is nothing to see at the site today in the conventional sense; the excavation has been built over, and the ringfort enclosure exists now within or adjacent to a residential area. The value of knowing about this house lies less in any physical visit than in what it represents about the archaeology of the Dublin commuter belt, where early medieval settlement evidence keeps surfacing just ahead of the diggers. Anyone with a particular interest in the record can consult the excavation licence through the National Monuments Service, and Giacometti's 2011 publication remains the primary reference for the structural detail.