House - indeterminate date, Knockmoylan, Co. Kilkenny
Co. Kilkenny |
House
At Knockmoylan in County Kilkenny, the ghost of a medieval building sits in the ground, examined but never fully uncovered.
When topsoil was stripped during an archaeological assessment ahead of roadworks, a circular depression roughly six metres across came to light, defined by a slot-trench, the kind of narrow foundation cut that once held the base of a wall. The trench contained charcoal, burnt clay, and what appeared to be packing stones. Inside, four probable post-holes and a central feature suggested the interior arrangement of a small structure, and a gap in the slot indicated where a doorway had once stood. The house itself was not excavated. It was mapped, recorded, and left.
The assessment was carried out in 2006 as part of the N9/N10 Kilcullen to Waterford road improvement scheme, and the building sits within a wider enclosure that had already been visible on the first-edition Ordnance Survey six-inch map, the mid-nineteenth-century survey that first captured much of Ireland's field archaeology in systematic form. Radiocarbon dating placed activity at the enclosure between approximately AD 1050 and 1217, a period spanning the final generations of Gaelic Ireland before the Anglo-Norman transformation of the landscape. The circular form of the structure, modest in scale, fits the tradition of vernacular rural buildings of that era, though the evidence uncovered amounts to little more than the faint signature left by a wall and its posts. Excavation of the enclosure proceeded elsewhere on the site, but the house itself fell just outside the permitted limits, leaving its interior questions unanswered.