House - Neolithic, Loughgur, Co. Limerick
Co. Limerick |
Settlement Sites
What is now rocky pasture on the south-facing slope of Knockadoon Peninsula, overlooking Lough Gur in County Limerick, was once the floor of a small circular dwelling built during the Neolithic period.
The house, known to archaeologists as Site C House III, is invisible on the ground today and does not appear on any historic Ordnance Survey maps or on aerial orthoimages taken as recently as 2011 to 2013. Its existence is known only through excavation. Even its precise location remains a best estimate, worked out by correlating the original excavation report with aerial photography taken decades later.
The site was uncovered in 1949 as part of a remarkable eighteen-season campaign of excavations at Lough Gur led by Professor Seán P. Ó Ríordáin, whose findings were published in 1954. House III was structurally distinct from the other houses uncovered nearby. Rather than a solid perimeter wall, it had a single ring of light timber posts set at irregular intervals, ranging from 0.2 to 1.5 metres apart, their tips surviving only because they had been driven into the underlying boulder clay. The building was roughly circular, about 5 metres in diameter, with one larger internal post-hole, slightly off-centre, that may have carried a roof-support post. Two burnt patches on the floor were interpreted as possible hearths. A yellow clay bank lying about 4.2 metres to the north-west, composed of redeposited boulder clay, charcoal, and organic matter, prompted Ó Ríordáin to suggest some form of enclosure, though later analysis by Rose Cleary, writing in 2018, found the evidence for this unconvincing. Scattered stone walls were also recorded during the 1949 dig, but these appear to have been late additions unrelated to the Neolithic occupation. The peninsula as a whole is extraordinarily dense with prehistoric remains, and further Neolithic and Bronze Age sites lie within metres of House III in every direction.
Visitors to Lough Gur will find the landscape itself rewarding, even if House III leaves no surface trace. The Knockadoon Peninsula is accessible from the Lough Gur visitor centre, and the south-facing slopes above the lake are easy walking. The broader Site C area, along with the nearby stone circle known as Circle K, lying roughly 92 metres to the north-north-west, gives some sense of how thickly this peninsula was occupied over millennia. Anyone with a particular interest in the 1949 excavations should note that the exact footprint of House III remains uncertain; what can be said is that it lies somewhere in the rocky pasture in this vicinity, below the turf, its post-holes still driven into the clay.