5,500-year-old farmhouse discovered

The discovery of a 5,500-year-old house during the construction of the new M11 has been documented as the oldest farmstead in Wexford. The structure itself has long disappeared, but archaeologists were able to uncover details such as the size of the Neolithic house and the variety of grain used by the farmers.

“When we had soil samples taken from the ground and analysed, we found multiple grains of barley, wheat and emmer (a very primitive type of wheat). So it’s very exciting to figure out, through this specialist analysis, what people were eating, what foodstuffs they were using in their everyday life,” archaeologist from Transport Infrastructure Ireland Bernice Kelly told the Irish Farmers Journal.

This house was discovered by exploratory test trenching during the construction of the new motorway between Gorey and Enniscorthy.

“We stripped it back around the foundations of the house. The superstructure itself had rotted away thousands of years ago. But the team of archaeologists excavated out the foundations, which were quite deep.”

The house itself was 14m long and 7m wide, which would have been “quite substantial” for its time. It would have been built using stone tools typical of the Neolithic period. For example, the Newgrange monument is also a Neolithic construction.

“This was no mean feat to erect a construction of this size. There were pottery vessels that were broken and found in the foundations, there were flint tools present, and all of these were analysed by specialists,” Kelly said.

The house has been preserved by record, which means it has been fully excavated and recorded. A report has been prepared for the Department of Culture, Heritage and the Gaeltacht.

The findings of the dig will be housed in the national museum of Ireland.

“We’ve already had an exhibition with some of the more robust finds at Enniscorthy Castle,” said Kelly.

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