House - prehistoric, Tankardstown South, Co. Limerick

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Settlement Sites

House – prehistoric, Tankardstown South, Co. Limerick

A field in Tankardstown South, Co. Limerick contains the buried remains of a Neolithic house that ended in fire sometime around three thousand years before the earliest written records of Ireland.

What makes the site quietly extraordinary is not just the age of the structure, but that it was not alone. A second house, designated House 2, was found lying just 20 metres north-west of a house already excavated in 1986, and like its neighbour it too appears to have been destroyed by burning. Together they suggest a settlement of some scale, set in a landscape that also contained ring ditches and a cremation pit to the immediate east, the ring ditch being a roughly circular earthwork trench that often surrounds a burial monument or marks a site of ceremonial significance.

House 2 was excavated over three seasons between 1987 and 1989, under the direction of Christine Tarbett and Margaret Gowen. When complete, it measured approximately 15.2 metres by 7.4 metres, with a large central compartment of around 9.2 metres flanked by a narrow annexe at each end, giving it an unusual tripartite plan. The walls were defined by a foundation trench, the kind of slot dug to receive the base of timber uprights, and charred vertical posts were found in situ in the eastern wall section. Finds from the trench fill included fragments of Western Neolithic round-bottomed shouldered bowls, one with a carefully made D-section rim that stood out among the assemblage, along with flint flakes that may represent knapping waste, the debris left over from shaping stone tools. Radiocarbon dates obtained for the associated House 1 from charcoal samples processed at Groningen returned uncalibrated figures of 5105 plus or minus 45 and 4880 plus or minus 110 years before present, placing activity at the site deep in the Neolithic period. Cereal grain identified as Triticum dicoccum, an early form of emmer wheat, was also recovered from House 1's foundation fill, suggesting the people who lived here were farmers.

The site lies in pasture, roughly 30 metres south of the townland boundary with Ballygubba, and there is nothing visible above ground today. No earthwork survives; what remains is entirely subsurface, recorded and then returned to farmland. Visitors interested in the broader landscape context may find it useful to consult the National Monuments Service record, which logs the associated features including the ring ditches and cremation pit to the east. The site is not accessible as a visitor destination, but the excavation reports by Tarbett and Gowen, published in the Excavations bulletin series for 1988 and 1989, remain the primary source for anyone wanting to understand what was found beneath this otherwise unremarkable Limerick field.

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