Gobae,
Thanks, I think i spent 50 hours on that bed, 20 of which was carving.
The bed is indeed Viking in design and was made using plans that were developed from the Gokstad and Osberg finds.
http://www.ravensgard.org/prdunham/Gbed.html
I modified the plans dimensionally to suit my particular space. ( I raised the bed up for more storage room underneath to hide mundane stuff and added a few slats and center support rail for stability, this was made of cheap ¾ pine from home depot for economy sake, and the foot posts are cedar 4x4s.)
There are actually only two bands of simple rope twist knot work in the design, the rest is a stylized boar shape made of arcs, circles and swoops in sort of a interpretation of insular le tene. Though ultimately the inspiration for the boar was from a Pictish stone carving.
As for historic justification, you hit upon it with the round house post hole mention. I don’t recall my source offhand, but evidence of slat beds were found in round houses where the slats of the bed actually socketed into the wattle and daub work of the perimeter wall.
Ancient texts make reference to “bed boxes” and privacy screens for sleeping partitions in round houses, which would make sense to have as close to the outer wall as possible in a radial design leaving the middle of the round house for the common area and fire pit etc.
Since I could find no schematic for an Irish bed, and since my tent is certainly not of wattle and daub construction anyway, we used the Viking plans. (there are actually three or four beds of similar construction floating around – all carved in different styles)
I figure a slat bed is a slat bad, similar to how an oar pretty much must be shaped like an oar to work.
I know another round house bedding alternative was a formed clay slab of sorts.. also impractical for tent camping.
I’ll see if I can dig up my references.
