House - indeterminate date, Killoran, Co. Tipperary
Co. Tipperary |
House
Beneath the spread of Derryville Bog in County Tipperary, on a low ridge that once rose just enough above the waterlogged ground to make settlement viable, the remains of a small Bronze Age settlement came to light in circumstances that owe nothing to planned archaeology.
Topsoil removal, presumably for peat extraction or land clearance, triggered monitoring work that revealed not one but a cluster of round house sites, the kind of domestic grouping that rarely survives intact enough to read clearly. What emerged was a settlement of at least three contemporary round houses standing side by side, with traces of earlier and ancillary structures complicating the picture further.
Excavation, recorded by Ó Néill in 1998, distinguished five structures in total, labelled A through E. Houses A, B, and C appear to have been in use at the same time, their doorways all oriented to the south-east, a consistent choice that would have minimised exposure to the prevailing wind. House A was the largest, roughly nine metres in diameter, its circular wall defined by a slot cut into the ground to hold the base of wattle-built walls, with six post-holes set in a ring inside to carry the roof. House B, immediately to the north and slightly smaller at around eight metres across, followed the same arrangement. House C lay to the north-east but was only partially recoverable, disturbed by a later field boundary and tree-line. A fourth structure to the south, Structure D, remained ambiguous in function, while Structure E, probably earlier than the others, had been cut through by the wall-slots of houses A and B, suggesting at least two phases of activity on the ridge. The finds gathered across the site reinforce a Bronze Age date: coarse pottery, a fragment of a saddle quern (a flat stone used for grinding grain), burnt daub, rubbing stones, hammerstones, a possible whetstone, and worked pieces of chert and flint. Taken together, they sketch the routines of a small farming community going about its daily work on a patch of dry ground surrounded by bog.


