House - medieval, Bray, Co. Kerry
Co. Kerry |
House
On the south-east-facing slopes of Bray Head on Valentia Island, a stretch of earth and stone platforms marks where a small medieval community once organised its domestic life along what archaeologists have described as a "street" of houses.
Six house-platforms extend for roughly 70 metres along an east-west line, and the one excavated here in 1994 and 1995 turned out to be considerably more complex than its modest dimensions suggested. The main structure, measuring 6.7 metres north to south and 3.4 metres east to west, was rectangular and stone-built, fitted with an unusual three-door arrangement, two in the west wall and one in the east. Beneath the floor, stone-capped drains carried water away from the interior, a practical engineering detail that speaks to the boggy realities of building on a hillside platform partly cut into the slope.
Excavation revealed at least two distinct phases of occupation. In the earlier phase, a central unlined hearth sat in the main room; in a later rearrangement, the interior was divided into two rooms and the hearth was moved northward into the smaller of them, measuring just 2.8 metres in length. An annexe, built against the south gable, added two further rooms, though its clay-bonded stone walls survived only to footing level when excavated in 1995. Beneath its southern room, a drainage channel roofed with large lintels mirrored the system in the main house, and outside the annexe's eastern room a pit roughly half a metre deep was found, its purpose unclear. The finds recovered were few but telling: a fragment of an iron knife and a sherd of Low Countries Redware, a distinctive red-bodied pottery produced in the Netherlands and traded widely across Atlantic Europe between the fourteenth and seventeenth centuries. Radiocarbon dating of burnt material from the primary floor placed occupation broadly between 1410 and 1620 AD. Taken together, these six houses may represent the village of Crompeol, a settlement name that appears on a map of Valentia in the Carew Manuscripts, a collection of state papers dating to around 1600. The building was deliberately demolished after it was abandoned, leaving only the platform and footings that excavation eventually brought back into focus.