House - Iron Age, Lislackagh, Co. Mayo

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House – Iron Age, Lislackagh, Co. Mayo

Beneath what is now the N5 Swinford bypass in County Mayo, road construction in the early 1990s exposed something that had lain undisturbed for roughly two thousand years: a small circular house from the Iron Age, its timber frame long since burnt away, surviving only as a faint trench pressed into the earth.

The house came to light during excavations in 1992 and 1993, carried out in advance of the bypass construction. It sat within the western half of a rath, the term used for a roughly circular earthen enclosure, typically defined by banks and ditches, that served as a farmstead during the Iron Age and early medieval periods in Ireland. The structure itself was modest, around 3.5 metres in diameter, and defined by a foundation trench, the kind of shallow channel into which upright timber posts would have been set to form the walls of a roundhouse. No floor surface survived, but charcoal recovered from the trench appears to represent the burnt remains of those structural timbers. Radiocarbon dating placed the material firmly in the Iron Age, producing a calibrated date range of 92 BC to AD 58, a span that straddles the turn of the millennium. Two further circular houses of similar form were identified immediately to the north and west, suggesting that this was not an isolated dwelling but part of a small domestic cluster within the one enclosure.

The site is no longer accessible in any meaningful sense, having been recorded and then absorbed into road infrastructure. What remains is the excavation record itself, and the knowledge that the ordinary business of Iron Age life, people building and burning and rebuilding their homes inside a ditched enclosure on the Mayo landscape, persisted here for decades or generations before the ground finally closed over it.

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