House - Bronze Age, Kilmurry, Co. Wicklow

Co. Wicklow |

Settlement Sites

House – Bronze Age, Kilmurry, Co. Wicklow

A gas pipeline is not, as a rule, the kind of project that rewrites prehistoric settlement history, but that is more or less what happened at Kilmurry in County Wicklow in 2001.

Advance excavation ahead of a Bord Gáis Éireann pipeline uncovered the ground plan of a Bronze Age round house that had been sitting undisturbed beneath the surface for somewhere between three and four thousand years.

What the excavators found was a double-ringed structure, a design typical of later prehistoric round houses in Ireland, where an outer ring of wall slots, in this case about 11.5 metres in diameter, defined the exterior boundary of the building, while an inner ring of posts, roughly 8.6 metres across, would have supported the roof. The entrance faced south-west, a common orientation that would have caught afternoon light and offered some shelter from prevailing weather. At the centre of the floor there was a hearth. The finds were modest: a few pieces of struck flint, the kind of debris left over from knapping stone tools, and a scatter of coarse pottery sherds found just to the north of the building. Those sherds were assessed as probably middle or late Bronze Age in date, placing occupation of the site somewhere in the broad window between roughly 1500 and 600 BC. The house was not an isolated structure either; it formed part of a wider habitation site in the same area, suggesting a more sustained period of settlement rather than a single household alone in the landscape.

Rated 0 out of 5

Visitor Notes

Review type for post source and places source type not found
Added by
Picture of Pete F
Pete F
IrishHistory.com is passionate about helping people discover and connect with the rich stories of their local communities.
Please use the form below to submit any photos you may have of House – Bronze Age, Kilmurry, Co. Wicklow. We're happy to take any suggested edits you may have too. Please be advised it will take us some time to get to these submissions. Thank you.
Name
Email
Message
Upload images/documents
Maximum file size: 50 MB
If you'd like to add an image or a PDF please do it here.