Structure, Curraghatoor, Co. Tipperary

Co. Tipperary |

Utility Structures

Structure, Curraghatoor, Co. Tipperary

A field of pasture in County Tipperary holds no obvious sign that anything was ever built there.

The ground slopes gently southward, the terrain rolls softly, and to any passing eye the land is simply farmland. Yet beneath the grass, the faint geometry of a Bronze Age building survives in the soil, invisible at ground level but legible from the air, where a 1977 aerial photograph captured the telltale cropmarks of a structure that had otherwise left no surface trace at all. Cropmarks appear when buried features such as walls or ditches affect how vegetation grows above them, producing patterns of darker or lighter growth that only become apparent from altitude.

Excavations carried out between 1987 and 1991, under the reference E00455, uncovered a foundation trench interpreted as part of a building that extended further to the east than the excavated portion revealed. The construction method matched closely with a cluster of Bronze Age houses investigated in the same area, with at least five comparable structures lying within roughly eight to twenty metres to the north and west. The excavator, whose findings were published by Doody in 2007, treated this as Structure 10 within a broader settlement complex, suggesting that what lies at Curraghatoor is not an isolated curiosity but a fragment of a community whose houses were arranged across this gentle slope perhaps three or four thousand years ago. The concentration of related structures in such a compact area points to a settlement of some density, though much of it remains underground and, for now, out of sight.

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Pete F
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