House - medieval, Dublin South City, Co. Dublin

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House – medieval, Dublin South City, Co. Dublin

Somewhere beneath the modern streetscape of High Street in Dublin's south city, a building was demolished, rebuilt, and rebuilt again across the course of roughly a century, before disappearing so completely that only excavation ahead of a development project eventually brought it back to light.

What emerged was a post-and-wattle structure, a type of construction common in medieval Ireland in which upright posts are interwoven with flexible rods or branches to form walls, modest in its dimensions but dense with evidence of daily life. The exposed wall sections measured 4.4 metres east to west and 4.2 metres north to south, a small footprint that nonetheless went through two structural rebuildings and four distinct phases of internal occupation.

The excavation at 1–3 High Street revealed a building that had been in active use from the mid to late twelfth century through to roughly the mid-thirteenth, with the pottery assemblage providing the clearest dating evidence. Remarkably, 96 per cent of the ceramic finds were imported wares, originating from north-west France and south-west England, which speaks to Dublin's position during this period as a port town with direct trading connections across the Irish Sea and the Channel. A stone surface and wooden pathway lay immediately to the east of the building during its earliest phase, and two door jambs along with threshold planks hint that the structure may have served as the entrance to a craft workshop. Interpretation was complicated by a large intrusive pit that had cut through the interior, obscuring the relationship between the building's phases. Among the finds were two complete stave-built buckets, their wooden staves bound together with hoops in a technique unchanged for centuries, and a fragment of a penannular brooch, a type of ring-pin fastening associated with early medieval Ireland, which dated to the ninth century but was recovered from a twelfth-century context, suggesting it had already been old when it was lost or discarded.

The site itself no longer carries any visible trace of what was found beneath it; this is archaeology rather than standing remains, and the address at 1–3 High Street is now subsumed into the built fabric of the Liberties area. The value of the site lies in what it contributed to the broader picture of pre- and early Anglo-Norman Dublin, and the excavation record, attributed to researcher Murtagh, remains part of the archive of urban archaeology in the city. Anyone with an interest in Dublin's medieval layers would find it worth reading alongside the findings from other High Street and Winetavern Street excavations, which together form the most detailed picture available of what this quarter of the city looked like before stone buildings replaced timber ones entirely.

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