Structure, Folkstown Little, Co. Dublin
Co. Dublin |
Utility Structures
A single wheat grain, recovered from the ground at Folkstown Little in County Dublin, carries within it a date range of 1256 to 1376 AD.
That small biological fact is almost everything we know about a modest medieval outbuilding that would otherwise have vanished entirely from the record, erased by centuries of soil accumulation and, eventually, the prospect of modern development.
The structure came to light during excavation carried out in advance of a proposed development, under licence number 08E054EXT. What the archaeologists found measured roughly 4 metres by 2.5 metres, defined by the remains of two dry-stone walls, a technique in which stones are laid without mortar, relying on careful placement and weight alone for stability. Both walls had been sealed beneath a substantial deposit of medieval pottery, suggesting the building had fallen out of use and been gradually buried before the ground above it accumulated those discarded ceramic fragments. Inside the footprint, a small gully ran through the interior, and the surrounding area contained a cluster of stakeholes, the compressed or stained patches in soil that indicate where wooden stakes or posts once stood. The whole assembly was interpreted as an agricultural outbuilding, the kind of ancillary structure that would have supported a nearby farmstead or rural settlement during the later medieval period. Radiocarbon dating of the naked wheat grain, a variety of wheat with no husk enclosing the seed, returned a calibrated date range of 1256 to 1376 AD, placing the site firmly within the medieval landscape of north County Dublin. The findings were reported by Kyle in 2011.
The site itself is not marked or publicly accessible in any formal sense, and there is nothing visible at ground level today. Its significance lives in the excavation record rather than in any surviving physical presence. For those interested in the medieval rural archaeology of the Dublin hinterland, the pottery assemblage and the radiocarbon result together offer a rare, precisely dated glimpse of ordinary agricultural life in a period that left few obvious traces on this stretch of landscape.