House - Neolithic, Earlsrath, Co. Kilkenny
Co. Kilkenny |
Settlement Sites
Beneath the Co. Kilkenny farmland at Earlsrath, the ground holds the outline of a house built roughly six thousand years ago, long before the idea of Ireland as a place had any meaning to anyone living there.
The structure was never visible above the surface when archaeologists arrived; what they found were the shallow trenches cut to receive its foundation timbers, the ghostly negative of walls that had long since rotted away.
The house came to light in 2006 during excavations carried out ahead of the N9/N10 Waterford to Kilcullen Road Scheme. It was one of two rectangular Neolithic houses set parallel to each other, both oriented northeast to southwest and separated by roughly four metres. The northwest house, the one recorded here, measured approximately 13.1 metres by 7 metres, making it a substantial timber structure for its period. Its foundation trenches, the narrow slots dug to hold upright wall timbers, were notably shallower than those of its neighbour, which may explain why the southwest wall left almost no trace at all; shallow cuts are more easily erased by centuries of ploughing and soil movement. Inside, a scatter of post-holes and linear features hints at some form of internal division, perhaps separate areas for sleeping, storage, or animals. Radiocarbon dating placed the house's earliest use somewhere between 4227 and 3970 cal BC, squarely within the early Neolithic period, when farming communities were beginning to establish themselves across Ireland. The two houses were later cut through by a large boundary ditch, suggesting the site was reorganised or reused long after the original structures had fallen. A group of four small pits found to the northeast of the house produced a radiocarbon date of 753 to 413 cal BC, placing them in the Iron Age, a reminder that the same ground attracted human activity across thousands of years.