House - indeterminate date, Cush, Co. Limerick
Co. Limerick |
House
On a rough stretch of pasture on Slievereagh, a hillside in County Limerick, the ground holds the faint traces of a house built on top of another house, on a site where yet more buildings once stood before that.
The exact date of any of them is unknown. What survives is partial, the northern wall entirely absent, the outline completed on the excavation plan only with a dotted line drawn from the evidence of three remaining walls. It is a modest rectangle, approximately 5.5 metres by 4.26 metres, and it sits within a larger archaeological complex that has been associated since at least the early twentieth century with Temaír Erann, the supposed ancient cemetery of the Ernai tribe.
The antiquarian Thomas Johnson Westropp noted the significance of this site in a series of papers published between 1917 and 1919, situating it within the broader landscape of Slievereagh, known in Irish as Sliabh Riabhach. It was the archaeologist Seán P. Ó Ríordáin who excavated the area in detail, publishing his findings in 1940. He was working within what he called the Enclosure, a rectangular area defined on three sides by a bank and fosse (a fosse being a defensive ditch), with a group of conjoined ring-forts, roughly circular earthwork enclosures typical of early medieval Ireland, forming the fourth side. The northern and western edges carried an additional outer bank for further protection. Within this enclosed area, Ó Ríordáin identified multiple house sites. The one recorded here, which he labelled Site c, was complicated from the outset: its main structure had been built directly over an earlier house, designated Site b, with one of its walls resting on the silt that had accumulated and filled the space between the earlier building's walls. Faint charcoal bands in the soil hinted at still more structures, though none clear enough to reconstruct.
The site lies in the southern part of the wider archaeological complex at Cush and is set in rough pasture, so the ground underfoot is uneven and the remains are not presented or signposted in any formal sense. Visitors with an interest in early Irish settlement should come with a copy of Ó Ríordáin's 1940 publication or at least a working familiarity with his site plans, since the visible traces on the ground are fragmentary and easy to misread without that context. The broader Cush complex rewards careful attention to the landscape rather than any single feature in isolation.