House - medieval, Kilmallock, Co. Limerick

When a single-storey flat-roofed structure was cleared to make way for a new development, what emerged from the excavation beneath it was not one tidy medieval floor plan but a layered accumulation of pits, wall foundations, a cobbled laneway, and waterlogged organic deposits that together suggested a busy street-front property occupied from at least the twelfth century onwards.

The excavation was carried out under licence No. 04E0783 by Annette Quinn of Tobar Archaeological Services. The site measured roughly 11 metres along its Sarsfield Street frontage and 22 metres along Emmet Street, placing it squarely within the core of the original medieval town. Five test-trenches were opened first, and the results were significant enough to warrant a full excavation. The northern two-thirds of the site had been heavily disturbed, with modern concrete infrastructure, drains, and a large cut for a diesel tank having removed much of what lay there, including what archaeologists suspected was a house fronting onto Emmet Street. The southern end proved more rewarding. There, deeper stratigraphy survived, along with the partial remains of a stone house foundation set into a large rectangular cut, a substantial medieval wall running east-west, and a roughly cobbled laneway with an even earlier metalled surface beneath it. Several pits, one of them wood-lined and possibly used as a small cistern, were filled with leather, bone, straw, wood, and medieval pottery sherds. The pottery evidence points to a main period of occupation running from the twelfth to the fourteenth century, with post-medieval activity, evidenced by clay-pipe stems, continuing at the northern end of the site.

The site is now occupied by a later building, and nothing of the excavation is visible at street level. Kilmallock itself, however, remains one of the better-preserved medieval towns in Munster, and the junction of Sarsfield Street and Emmet Street sits close to other surviving fabric of the period, including the town walls and the collegiate church. For anyone interested in how medieval urban plots actually functioned, the excavation report, accessible through the excavations.ie database, offers a granular picture of a working town property, refuse pits, lanes, outbuildings, and all, that no standing monument could quite convey.