House - prehistoric, Barnageeragh, Co. Dublin
Co. Dublin |
Settlement Sites
At Barnageeragh in County Dublin, a patch of ground that looks unremarkable today once held a Bronze Age dwelling, a burial, a burnt mound, and a later ringfort, all within close proximity of one another.
That kind of layered occupation, spanning different periods and different uses of the same landscape, is precisely what makes excavation results like these worth pausing over.
When archaeologists investigated the site in 2006, they uncovered a cluster of seven postholes and two stakeholes arranged in a sub-circular pattern roughly six metres in diameter, with a central hearth. Postholes are the soil impressions left by upright timbers that once formed the structural frame of a building; their pattern here suggests a roundhouse of the kind commonly associated with prehistoric settlement in Ireland. Sherds of pottery of possible Bronze Age date and struck flint were recovered from within those postholes, pointing to occupation sometime in the second or first millennium BC, though the dating remains tentative. The finds were recorded by E. Corcoran and published in 2009. Southwest of the house site lay an inhumation burial set within a ring ditch, a low circular earthwork that would originally have defined a funerary enclosure, and beyond that again a burnt mound. Burnt mounds are accumulations of fire-cracked stone, typically the byproduct of heating water in a trough, and are found widely across prehistoric Ireland, though their precise function is still debated. To the north of this prehistoric cluster, a ringfort was also identified, containing what may be a second house site and two souterrains, the latter being underground stone-lined passages associated with early medieval settlement, used variously for storage or refuge.
Barnageeragh lies in north County Dublin, and the site was identified through development-led excavation rather than any standing monument, which means there is nothing visible at ground level today. The archaeological record here exists largely in published reports rather than in the landscape itself. Readers wanting to explore the findings further should look to Corcoran's 2009 publication. The broader area of north Dublin repays attention for anyone interested in how densely prehistoric and early medieval communities used what is now quiet suburban and coastal fringe land.