2013:003 - Drumreagh, Antrim

Paul Logue of the Northern Ireland Environment Agency noticed unusual brickwork in a small vernacular house, now utilised as an outbuilding at Drumreagh on the outskirts of the village of Bendooragh, Co. Antrim. The brick, which had been exposed when render had collapsed from a gable wall, was typical of 17th-century brick being considerably thinner than later 18th- or 19th- century types. This raised the possibility that this was a surviving 17th-century structure. That the building was of some age was indicated by its appearance on the first edition of the OS Map; the role of the excavation was to attempt to ascertain if the structure was indeed of 17th-century date, or whether 17th-century style bricks had been reused in the fabric of a later structure.
An area to the exterior of the house, measuring approximately 20m by 20m, was stripped of topsoil in the hope of finding rubbish pits exterior to the house. While some features consistent with the de-marking and subdivision of a garden area to the rear of the house were found the artefacts were all 19th or 20th century in date. In the house interior two trenches were excavated. One trench at the east end of the house was targeted on the hearth against the west gable. A second long trench extended from the west gable into the centre of the house. These trenches revealed that the house originally had a central hearth, with an iron grate and two internal partitions which divided the house into three rooms, an eastern room, a central room and a western room. No evidence for a lobby, hall or similar was uncovered, access being direct from the exterior into the central room. A succession of repairs to the central hearth were made and replacement floors laid down in the central room. In the later 19th century the eastern room was subdivided by a party wall footed upon the original earthen floor into two smaller rooms and a fireplace with chimney was constructed against the eastern gable, the smaller room at the south-east having a wooden floor. The floor of the western room was also dug up and replaced with a wooden floor at some stage however, as bricks, significantly more modern in appearance that the wall bricks, were placed to support wooden joists in this room. A careful examination of the fabric of the surviving structure indicated that at some stage, possibly at the same time as the later 19th century reworking of the internal architecture of the house, the height of the house was raised by about 0.5m. This may have been to accommodate an upper story and it is likely that a window in the eastern gable, and a door in the western gable leading to a lean-to structure, were inserted at this time.
The light brick superstructure at Drumreagh seems too light to have borne the weight of the roof of the structure (pers. comm. Colm Donnelly). Today the roof is actually supported by four piers constructed from concrete blocks in the 1970s or 1980s when the building was renovated for use as a store. These concrete block piers may however be a replacement of the original roof supports, their role in supporting the roof and their positioning is reminiscent of a cruck replicated in concrete.
The results of the excavation are apparently contradictory. On the one hand there are elements which appear quite antiquated, the use of, apparently, 17th-century bricks and the evidence for a cruck supported roof. On the other hand the excavation did not find any artefactual evidence for 17th- or even early 18th-century occupation at Drumreagh; some of the creamwares found could potentially date to the later 18th century but their use could also extend into the early decades of the 19th. Two possibilities present themselves, either there was a continuation of 17th-century building traditions at Drumreagh into the later 18th or early 19th centuries, or the excavation was unlucky and simply missed any 17th-century material culture.

Centre for Archaeological Fieldwork, School of Geography, Archaeology and Palaeoecology, Queen’s University Belfast