House - Bronze Age, Kiltenan South, Co. Limerick
Co. Limerick |
Settlement Sites
What survives of a probable Bronze Age house in Kiltenan South, County Limerick amounts to less than half a circle traced in the earth: a shallow, curving gully, dozens of post-holes and stake-holes, a scattering of pits, and a small patch of heat-reddened clay that marks where a hearth once sat, slightly off-centre within the building.
The whole picture is fragmentary almost by definition, because the excavation that uncovered it was itself cut short. The trench ran only as far as the pipeline corridor allowed, and the rest of the structure almost certainly continues into the field beyond.
The site came to light in 2002 during archaeological work carried out by Kate Taylor (excavation reference 02E0667) as part of Bord Gáis Éireann's Pipeline to the West project, a large infrastructure scheme that generated a considerable number of roadside and field excavations across the midlands and west of Ireland. Within the permitted area, Taylor's team recorded two lengths of gully, 33 post-holes, 70 stake-holes, twelve pits, and the possible hearth. The key feature was Gully 37, a curving trench 4.2 metres long and up to 0.2 metres deep, which appears to represent either a foundation trench for the walls or a drip gully, the kind of shallow channel that forms around a thatched structure as rainwater runs off the eaves. Two unusually large post-holes to the south of this gully, each roughly a metre across and the deeper one reaching 0.6 metres down, are interpreted as the sockets for heavy entrance timbers, suggesting a south-east-facing doorway between one and one and a half metres wide. If the curve of the surviving gully is extended mathematically into a full circle, it gives a diameter of around 12 metres, though the excavators noted that stake-holes further out might push that figure to as much as 20 metres. Only six artefacts were recovered across the whole site: two chert flakes, a small quartz crystal, two fragments that may be pottery or daub, and some burnt bone, leaving the date of occupation dependent on radiocarbon analysis of charcoal from the sieved samples.
There is nothing to see at the surface today. The site lies beneath agricultural land and was never a scheduled monument with visible remains; it is the kind of place that exists primarily in an excavation report rather than in any landscape you can walk through. For anyone interested in the broader context, the excavations.ie database holds the full site report, and the Pipeline to the West project as a whole produced a substantial body of prehistoric finds across counties Limerick, Tipperary, and further north, much of it published in the years following the construction work. The Kiltenan South house is a small, ambiguous piece of that record, but it points to a settled, domestic Bronze Age presence in this part of Limerick that would otherwise leave no trace at all.