House - Neolithic, Loughgur, Co. Limerick
Co. Limerick |
Settlement Sites
On the south-facing slope of the Knockadoon Peninsula in County Limerick, a low rectangle of stones sits in rocky pasture roughly fifty metres above the shoreline of Lough Gur.
To a casual eye it might read as a field boundary or a natural scatter of rock, but what it actually preserves is the ground plan of a house built somewhere between 3750 and 3600 BC, making it one of the earlier domestic structures known from Neolithic Ireland. The walls are long gone, but the stone footings remain, and on aerial imagery the rectangular outline is still legible, a faint signature of everyday life pressed into the hillside for five and a half thousand years.
The site, known as Site A, was uncovered in 1939 during the first season of what would become an eighteen-season programme of excavations at Lough Gur led by Professor Seán P. Ó Ríordáin. His work, and a later analysis by Rose Cleary published in 2018, revealed a carefully considered building measuring 6.1 metres east to west and 9.75 metres north to south, with a doorway positioned in the south-west corner. The stone footings, laid without a formal wall face and standing only one or two courses high, are thought to have functioned as a damp-proof base for walls of wattle construction, upright timber posts interwoven with rods and possibly packed with moss, brushwood, or rushes. The floor was not a deliberate layer of laid material but rather the exposed boulder clay itself, stripped back and used as a hard surface. A central hearth, roughly 0.7 metres across, sat over this floor, and a section near the south wall was later paved to compensate for the natural slope of the ground. The artefacts recovered were telling: an almost complete greenstone axehead found beneath the north foundation stones, two leaf-shaped flint arrowheads, scrapers, blade tools, and pottery consistent with Neolithic Class I wares. Later Bronze Age pottery also turned up, indicating the site saw renewed use long after its original occupation.
The Knockadoon Peninsula is unusually dense with archaeology, and Site A sits within a cluster of related excavated sites. Other excavated areas investigated by Ó Ríordáin lie within thirty-five to sixty metres to the north-east, and Circle K, a stone circle, is approximately 120 metres to the north. The footings of Site A are not marked on any historical Ordnance Survey maps, so visitors should expect no signage pointing specifically to this spot. The stones are visible on the ground and on satellite imagery, and a three-dimensional model of the site is available online at skfb.ly/os7BW for those who want to orient themselves before visiting. The area around Lough Gur is managed as a heritage site, and the peninsula is accessible on foot, though the rocky pasture and sloping terrain reward sensible footwear.