House - prehistoric, Ballygeale, Co. Limerick
Co. Limerick |
Settlement Sites
A prehistoric house that survived for millennia beneath a wet Limerick field only came to light because of a road scheme.
It does not appear on any Ordnance Survey historic mapping, and today there is nothing visible at the surface, yet the ground here once held a circular dwelling, a stone-lined well, and the accumulated debris of several generations of occupation.
The site at Ballygeale, sitting at the foot of a ridge in wet pasture, was identified in 1999 during monitoring of topsoil-stripping along the N20/N21 Adare to Annacotty Road Improvement Scheme. Archaeologists James Eogan and Sinclair Turrell carried out the excavation under Licence No. 99E0341, uncovering what they interpreted as the remains of a substantial roundhouse. The key structural trace was a penannular ditch, that is, an almost-complete circular trench, roughly 0.5 to 0.9 metres wide and describing a structure approximately ten metres in diameter. A penannular ditch of this kind typically represents a slot trench into which the base timbers of a circular wall were set. Here, a possible outer ring of posts may have formed wall supports, while an inner ring probably carried the roof. The entrance faced south. Inside, a central hearth and numerous stake-holes pointed to a well-organised domestic interior. To the east, a large pit measuring 3.35 by 3.5 metres turned out to be a stone-lined well, its shaft 0.6 metres wide and excavated to a depth of 2.4 metres, lined with undressed stones set in clay, with flat stones arranged around the mouth to allow access. Animal bone, wood, and burnt stone were recovered from its lower fill. The excavators noted that some post-holes and hearths appeared to pre-date the main circular structure, while a linear ditch and further pits seemed to represent later activity, suggesting the site was used across more than one period. A second prehistoric site lies just 200 metres to the south.
There is no above-ground trace of the site remaining, and aerial imagery from as recently as 2018 shows nothing at the surface. The location, in wet pasture near the townland boundary between Ballygeale and Attyflin in County Limerick, is not publicly accessible as an archaeological monument. What the Ballygeale house offers, then, is less a place to visit than a reminder of how much of Ireland's prehistoric landscape exists only in grey excavation reports and the coordinates logged on the Sites and Monuments Record, waiting for radiocarbon dates that may yet sharpen the picture considerably.