House - medieval, Bray, Co. Kerry
Co. Kerry |
House
At Bray Head on Valentia Island, a small medieval house sits tucked against a lynchet, the raised earthen step left by centuries of ploughing on a sloping field.
The building's footprint is oddly wedge-shaped, narrower at the south end than the north, a quirk that may have been dictated by the angle of the bank it was built against. It is not an obvious monument. There is no tower, no arch, no carved stonework. What it offers instead is something rarer: an unusually legible domestic sequence, a record of people adjusting their living arrangements over time in ways that archaeology can still trace.
Excavation in 2001, carried out by Hayden and reported in 2003, revealed two clear building phases. The first house was a simple drystone and sod construction, a single room measuring roughly 6.6 metres north to south, with a hearth near the northern interior and a doorway in the east wall fitted with a drainage channel to carry water out of the house. At some point the sod walls were replaced entirely with drystone, and the interior was subdivided by a well-built partition wall, creating two rooms. A narrow door opening of about 65 centimetres gave access between them, and a second hearth was installed against the south gable. Later still, that internal doorway was blocked up and the northern room was deliberately filled with clay and stones, effectively reducing the house back to a single usable space. The floor of the southern room was relaid in the later seventeenth century, suggesting the building remained in use well beyond its medieval origins. The house sits within a wider enclosure on the headland, and the field system around it, including that prominent lynchet, forms part of a broader agricultural landscape at Bray Head that has drawn sustained research attention.