IRELAND

discovery Ireland 48,49
favour of the advantages town life could bring – the ability to rid oneself
of the shackles of serfdom, become a skilled craftsperson or tradesperson.
The difference between life in towns and life on a rural rath or ringfort must
have been stark in terms of the noise, the smells, the sights, the sounds. And
yet how people managed their homes, their plots and yards was not
dissimilar. Interiors of homes were largely clean and warm, while yards and
garden plots were the “messy” spaces. Even here though it appears that
moving waste ‘out of sight’ was important, whether it was piling it up at one
location on a boundary or digging a pit to get rid of it or throwing it over
the fence into the lake or ditch surrounding your home.’
Ireland is potentially crucial to this developing area of research: ‘In order
to analyse insects in particular you need excellent preservation, ideally
waterlogged preservation – like that seen at Wood Quay in Dublin in the
1970s or Temple Bar in the 1990s. But in Ireland we also have a number
of significant rural settlement sites that were also preserved in this way,
for example, Deer Park Farms in Co. Antrim and, more recently, Drumclay
Crannog in Co. Fermanagh. This gives me the opportunity to compare
different types of settlement sites during this period, something not
available to researchers elsewhere in Europe.’