House - indeterminate date, Cloghlucas, Co. Cork

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House

House – indeterminate date, Cloghlucas, Co. Cork

A gas pipeline rarely makes for a sympathetic archaeological tool, but the construction of the Bruff-Mallow pipeline in 1986 did at least bring to light something that might otherwise have remained undisturbed and unrecorded in the townland of Cloghlucas in north Cork.

What the machinery exposed, before grading truncated it, was the ghost of a circular house: not walls, but the negative spaces left by walls, a ring of soil and shadow where timber once stood.

The structure measured roughly 9.5 metres in diameter, defined by an external drainage gully and a concentric ring of eleven or twelve post-holes set about 1.2 metres inside it. Post-holes are exactly what they sound like, the filled voids left when upright timbers rot or are removed, and here they form a coherent picture of a round wooden building. A gap to the south-south-west, with what appears to be the trace of a sill beam outside it, suggests a porch or defined entrance. Inside, some floor surfaces had survived, along with a hearth positioned slightly west of centre. Four large internal pits may have served as additional roof supports, taking some of the load from the ring of posts. More puzzling was a north-south trench towards the eastern interior, about 3.8 metres long, which the excavator M. Gowen interpreted as either an internal partition, burnt in place, or the remains of a separate rectangular structure attached to or near the main building. The deposit sealing it contained heat-shattered stones and burnt material, and extended eastward at a right angle, suggesting fire played some role in the structure's end or use. The date proposed is Iron Age or Early Christian, a broad span running roughly from the centuries before Christ into the early medieval period, based on the structural evidence alone. Clusters of pits and a hearth were recorded about 25 metres to the south, and further occupation traces lie around 525 metres beyond that, hinting at a wider pattern of settlement in this part of the landscape.

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