House - prehistoric, Killierisk, Co. Kerry

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House – prehistoric, Killierisk, Co. Kerry

Of the 33 test trenches opened across a field in Killierisk townland, Co. Kerry, 31 turned up nothing of note.

The two that did, sitting side by side at the south-western end of the field, contained the ghostly outline of a small circular structure, roughly 2.6 metres across, that had last been occupied sometime between 1760 and 1600 BC. That is not a loose estimate: radiocarbon dating of charcoal recovered from the site returned a calibrated date of precisely that range, placing the structure firmly in the Early to Middle Bronze Age, a period when much of Ireland's settled landscape remains poorly understood.

What the excavators found was a slot trench, a narrow continuous groove cut into the ground to receive the base of a wall or close-set timbers, running around the perimeter of the structure. It was 0.30 metres wide and packed with charcoal, suggesting the building had burned, collapsed, or both. A ring of postholes reinforced the circular plan, with additional posts noted both inside and just outside the main line, hinting at a more complex internal arrangement than the modest diameter might suggest. There was also a possible hearth inside. The only object recovered from the whole site was a single large piece of rock crystal, found in the slot trench itself. Rock crystal, a naturally occurring form of quartz, occasionally turns up in prehistoric contexts in Ireland, and while its significance here is unclear, its presence as the sole find gives it a quiet weight. The excavator drew comparisons with Bronze Age circular structures excavated at Chancellorsland in Co. Tipperary, a site that has become something of a reference point for this type of small roundhouse. The broader analysis was carried out by Michael Connolly as part of a 2008 PhD thesis examining prehistoric settlement across the Lee Valley near Tralee, situating this modest footprint within a wider pattern of Bronze Age land use in north Kerry.

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