House - indeterminate date, Lahesseragh, Co. Tipperary

Co. Tipperary |

House

House – indeterminate date, Lahesseragh, Co. Tipperary

A circular hut, barely four metres across, once sat on the western slope of Ballycahill ridge in County Tipperary.

It was never recorded by anyone who lived near it, and its age remains genuinely unknown. What we know about it exists only because a road was about to be built through the ground above it.

The structure came to light during archaeological monitoring carried out in advance of the Nenagh Bypass. Once exposed, it revealed itself as a modest dwelling defined by a shallow foundation trench, the kind of slot cut into the earth to receive the base timbers or stones of a wall. The hut measured roughly 3.3 by 3.7 metres internally, with a linear row of three post-holes running through its interior, supplemented by two smaller off-centre posts that likely helped support the roof. At the north-east corner, a gap of 1.4 metres in the foundation trench marks what was almost certainly the entrance, one side of which retained its flanking post-hole while the other had been disturbed beyond reading. To the south-west of the structure lay a scatter of pits and post-holes, and two larger rubbish pits that proved considerably more talkative. From them came a spindle whorl, used in hand-spinning thread; a rubbing stone; a grinding stone; two saddle querns, the paired stones used to grind grain by hand; burnt bone; wood fragments; charcoal; animal teeth; and flakes of chert, a flint-like stone worked to produce cutting edges. The assemblage suggests a household engaged in the ordinary business of processing food and making cloth, though the absence of datable material means the period in which they did so remains open.

The site sits about 300 metres west of a known prehistoric settlement on the same ridge, and its position on the slope would have given its occupants a broad view westward across the Tipperary lowlands. Whether the two sites were ever contemporaneous is a question the ground has not yet answered.

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