Structure, Killoran, Co. Tipperary
Co. Tipperary |
Utility Structures
Beneath the surface of Derryville Bog in County Tipperary, a Bronze Age settlement lay undisturbed on a low ridge of ground until the machinery of modern topsoil removal brought it back into the light.
What emerged was not a single dwelling but a cluster of round houses, standing close together, their circular wall-slots and post-holes still legible in the ground after thousands of years.
Excavation, reported by Ó Néill in 1998, revealed three round houses designated A, B, and C, which appear to have been contemporary and were arranged side by side. House A, around nine metres in diameter, was defined by a circular wall-slot, the kind of shallow trench into which timber posts or wattle panels would have been set to form the walls. Six post-holes arranged in a ring inside that slot held the roof supports, and the doorway faced southeast. House B sat immediately to the north, slightly smaller at around eight metres across, with a similar internal arrangement. House C, to the northeast, was only partially recoverable, disturbed by a later field boundary and tree-line. Two further structures complicated the picture: Structure D, roughly nine metres south of House A, was an interrupted gully of uncertain function, while Structure E appeared to be an older post-built structure that the later houses had cut through, suggesting the ridge had seen occupation in at least two distinct phases. The finds matched the architectural picture well. Coarse pottery of Bronze Age character came up alongside a fragment of a saddle quern, which is a flat grinding stone used to process grain, along with burnt daub, rubbing stones, hammerstones, a possible whetstone, and worked pieces of chert and flint. Taken together, the assemblage points to a small farming community going about ordinary domestic life on this slightly elevated ground, surrounded by bog that would have shaped everything from movement to fuel supply to the preservation of the very evidence that made the site legible to later excavators.


