House - medieval, Burgagery-Lands, Co. Tipperary
Co. Tipperary |
House
Beneath the surface of a Tipperary street junction, excavators uncovered something easily overlooked: a fragment of floor that may once have formed part of a medieval house, its presence confirmed not by stonework or standing walls but by the pottery left behind in the soil around it.
Work carried out at the junction of Market Street and Constitution Lane, in an area historically known as Burgagery-Lands, uncovered these remains under excavation licence 95E0052. The floor deposit was dated through locally made pottery attributed to the 13th and 14th centuries. Burgagery lands were plots typically granted to burgesses, the merchant and trading classes who inhabited medieval Irish towns, and their presence here suggests this was once a functioning part of an urban settlement. The pottery itself, being locally produced rather than imported, points to ordinary domestic life rather than anything exceptional, which in some ways makes the find more telling. It is the residue of someone's everyday existence, preserved by accident in the ground beneath a modern street.