COUNTY ANTRIM, NORTHERN IRELAND—Scientists looking for traces of a seventeenth-century town near Dunluce Castle discovered a structure dating to the late fifteenth or early sixteenth century. “What we are now beginning to uncover are traces of earlier and extensive late medieval settlement activity which are equally as important as the remains of the seventeenth-century Dunluce Town,” Mark H. Durkan, the Environment Minister for Northern Ireland, told Culture 24. The structures were probably part of a small settlement just outside of the original castle gate, close to the cliffs on which the castle was built. “Very few fifteenth-century buildings, other than those built entirely from stone, have survived in Ulster and normally there would be few traces, if any, for archaeologists to investigate. We are extremely lucky to make this exciting discovery,” he said. To read in-depth about the excavation of an early medieval site in the region, see "Saving Northern Ireland's Noble Bog."
